The Vegas Golden Knights are a grudgingly acquired taste with one of the gristliest coaches in modern North American sport, but when they serve the meal as they did Tuesday night, you're eating it because the alternative is leaving hungry. Sweeping the battered Colorado Avalanche with a clinical 2-1 win puts them back into the Stanley Cup Final, and doing it the chesty and bullying way they did it, is very much a Vegas copyright. The NHL has a performatively polite veneer when someone in their midst succeeds, but it does so through gritted teeth when it comes to Las Vegas, and you will hear that reluctance for the next week while Montreal and Carolina sort out the right side of the bracket. To call in John Tortorella to add tacks to that sandpaper makes little sense until you see it in action and discover that it was the only thing to be done.
Last night's closeout game didn't look particularly unique except that the Knights took the early lead after spotting the Avs the first period of the previous two. But once the games got legs, they played out the same way: with the Knights controlling play, space and time. They were healthier than Colorado, but injuries are not granted a high level of mitigation in hockey. It's a far more cynical and binary matter: If you're playing, you're healthy enough.
But Vegas has also been Vegas since the day it began. They still have four players from their original 2017–18 team, and even though this was their worst ever team by record and they had fewer regulation wins than 22 other teams including nearly the entire Atlantic Division, they have the postseason figured out. Their having the second-worst record of any division winner since the league instituted the loser point 20 seasons ago turns out to be as meaningless a statistic as the Presidents’ Trophy jinx because Vegas has as recognizable a style as any team in the league. Tortorella's principal contribution has been to polish that style and make it resonate as it did under Gerard Gallant in Year One and Bruce Cassidy in Year Six. They have the best playoff record of any team over the nine years they have existed, and their third trip to the Final makes them the equivalent of the other two dominant teams of the era, both of which play in Florida.
While it is true that the central nervous system of their roster is veteran center Mark Stone, who looks facially more like Tortorella than anyone under the age of 60, the actual achievement with this team may be in belatedly finding the big-moment capability of former Maple Leaf Mitch Marner, and the fact that Marner is a former Leaf matters in this context because no experience in the sport is more ultimately deflating than being a Leaf. If you don't think so, spend an hour with any Canadian talk show, not because the media there is mean but because it has perfected the one-trick pony aspect that American shows have for the Lakers and Cowboys. Tortorella has had better goalies in his time, but this roster as currently built is appreciably better for his style and methodology than even the Tampa one he guided to the 2004 Cup.
In sum, Colorado with a healthy Cale Makar and Nathan MacKinnon might have strung this series out but history suggests the result we got was the result we would have gotten anyway, only with a couple of extra games at the end. Vegas's willingness to surrender a second-round draft pick to defend its right to blow off broadcast partners and postgame interview rooms may seem ungentlemanly at best and annoyingly unnecessary at worst, but it is very much the Vegas experience, both with the franchise and the town in general. Tortorella just makes them more them, and when they tire of each other, maybe as soon as February of next year, they'll both understand how and why it happened.
In short, this is Vegas, and if you aren't down with it, sweet and dandy. You don't have to change, as long as you understand that Vegas isn't going to change either. They are what they are until they have to become something and someone else, and through nine years they see no reason to change a thing.
