Divorces are never nice, even if they are amicable, and the Vegas Golden Knights are finding that out right now.
Let’s rewind back to the summer when the Vegas Golden Knights, mired in salary cap hell, were facing a plethora of tough and perhaps season-defining decisions.
They allowed Pierre-Edouard Bellemare, a real staple of the team that had reached the postseason in consecutive years, to walk in free agency along with forward Ryan Carpenter.
Top-four defenseman Colin Miller was traded to the Buffalo Sabres, productive forward Erik Haula was dealt to the Carolina Hurricanes and the most significant departure was the trade that saw the New Jersey Devils acquire Nikita Gusev.
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The Vegas front office had to make those incredibly tough decisions in order to re-sign franchise center William Karlsson to an eight-year, $47,200,000 contract.
Other depth players in the ilk of Malcolm Subban Tomas Nosek and Brandon Pirri were also signed to new, team-friendly deals, but it is becoming clear that mistakes were made in the summer.
Now, before we carry on, I will be the first to admit that I felt the front office did the right thing during the off-season when it came to sacrificing depth in order to keep their established core together.
However, the longer the year has gone on, the more I have admitted that I was wrong and that, in-fact, those divorces back in the summer, as amicable as they were, are starting to look ugly now.
And there are two main reasons for that.
First, the Vegas Golden Knights have been plagued by inconsistency all year thanks in part to a lack of secondary scoring and a disjointed blueline that just isn’t getting the job done.
Looking at the defense, there is no doubt that Miller would have been a key part of that top four unit for the Golden Knights this year, while his presence would no doubt have helped on the power play, not to mention with the transition game that has been a real major bugaboo of this team.
And then there is the secondary scoring. Or lack thereof.
Losing Bellemare, Carpenter and Haula alone saw the Knights shed a combined total of 40 points from last year, which rises to 69 if you include Miller’s points from 2018-19.
It is also worth noting that Haula missed the majority of last season due to a serious knee injury, so that points total could have been higher.
So, when you consider that the bottom six forward unit, not including Paul Stastny who we will consider a top six forward for the purpose of this assignment, have contributed 77 points of the 388 points laid out by the Vegas Golden Knights so far this year, that gives you some idea as to what this team have lost by letting certain depth players go.
And what rubs further salt into the wound is the fact that the majority of those players are producing in big ways for their new teams.
Take Haula who has 19 points (11 goals, eight assists) in 30 games for the seemingly playoff-bound Carolina Hurricanes, despite missing a chunk of the season due to injury, while Bellemare has recorded seven goals and 11 assists for 18 points for an elite Colorado Avalanche team.
But the one who really got away was Nikita Gusev, who is starting to make the worst fears of those associated with the Golden Knights come true.
The Russian stud, who was traded to the New Jersey Devils for a third-round pick in the 2020 NHL Entry Draft and a second-round selection in the 2021 Draft, is flourishing in the Eastern Conference right now.
Despite being on a Devils team that has lurched from one disaster to the next this year, in spite of being the popular pick for a return to the postseason, Gusev has been one of New Jersey’s better performers and he is third on the team in points with 29 (eight goals, 21 assists).
Many feared that giving up Gusev for a relative small package would come back to haunt the Golden Knights and, unfortunately, that is proving to be the case right now.
Look at it this way; Haula, Bellemare and Gusev have combined for 66 points so far this year, which is just a few points shy of the amount put up by Vegas’ entire bottom six forward unit.
That stat alone epitomizes the secondary scoring struggles that have plagued the Knights so far this season, and it further highlights just how much of a risk the front office took back in the summer when deciding to prioritize the core of this team over some of its valuable and productive depth players.
Let’s just hope that the decision to feed the few rather than the dozen will not come back to haunt the Vegas Golden Knights in the long-term.