The Golden Knights are magical, but don’t confuse them for a fluke

The best expansion team in the modern history of professional sports isn’t done yet. The Vegas Golden Knights are in the Western Conference Finals, starting Saturday night with a game in Winnipeg against the Jets. Through one lens, this isn’t supposed to happen. It normally takes expansion teams a lot longer than one year to get this good. Through another lens, Vegas’ run isn’t surprising at all.

The NHL was generous to the Knights in how it structured the expansion draft that the new franchise used to get almost all of its players. The existing 31 teams were allowed to protect no more than 10 skaters and a goalie, and Vegas got to take one unprotected guy from each team. Given that every team has 23 players and most of them have more than 11 who are at least somewhat useful, the Knights were set up to get some solidly average players. They also figured to be able to capitalize on other teams’ bad contracts, taking players who were good but not good enough to justify their salaries on cap-strapped teams.

But when general manager George McPhee got around to picking his team in June 2017, it didn’t look like he was trying to win right away. Vegas made nearly a dozen deals to not take particular unprotected players, taking futures in exchange for making different picks. For example, from the Blue Jackets, McPhee got two high draft picks and agreed to take the contract of the retired David Clarkson in exchange for taking a player Columbus didn’t care about: winger William Karlsson, who’d scored 15 goals in 162 games the previous two years.

There were other, similar trades. One of them had the Penguins send a second-round regular draft pick to Vegas so that the Knights would take aging goalie Marc-Andre Fleury and his big cap hit instead of a younger, cheaper member of their Stanley Cup-winning core. Fleury had three rings and figured to be a good face of the Knights’ franchise, but he hadn’t been much better than an average goaltender in recent seasons.

It turned out that this roster wasn’t so horrible, or even horrible at all. Karlsson scored a previously incomprehensible 43 goals. Fleury had by far the best season of his career at 33. And there were other finds that pushed Vegas to this point.

The Panthers were negligent in exposing 30-goal scorer Jon Marchessault to the expansion draft, and Vegas happily snapped him up and got a career-high 75 points out of him. Making this funnier at the Panthers’ expense, they traded winger Reilly Smith to the Knights in exchange for Vegas taking Marchessault. Smith had a big cap number that Florida wanted to get rid of, but he gave the Knights a career-best 60 points.

James Neal’s own hefty cap number and the Predators’ forward depth helped Vegas get an easy 25 goals. Other castoffs David Perron (from the Blues) and Erik Haula (the Wild) were key supplements to Vegas’ offense. They got defenseman Colin Miller from the Bruins, and he turned out to be a dominant possession player who scored 41 points from the blue line.

So, Vegas’ best players were a mix of pleasant surprises and players who were predictably pretty good but turned out to be great. Helping all of those individual numbers has been that the Knights play really well together. They graded out well in possession stats during the regular season, and in the playoffs they’re second in the league in scoring chance share (53.1 percent) and fifth in shot attempts share (51.1). They spend a lot of time with the puck, and when they don’t have it, Fleury makes saves with numbing efficiency.

It’s weird that Karlsson and Marchessault are two of the best forwards in the whole world. It’s weird that Fleury is the best goaltender in the world right now. It’s weird that so many acquisitions have worked out so perfectly, no matter how friendly the expansion draft format was. It’s weird that it’s taken such little time for Vegas to become a hockey hub.

All of that’s already happened, though. It’s real.

But everyone knows by now that the 2017-18 Knights are a serious threat.