General Managers around the NHL have been desperately seeking answers to explain why the Las Vegas Golden Knights have succeeded in their inaugural year where so many teams continue to fail. How did this team with no super stars manage to make it to the Stanley Cup Final, losing only four playoff games en route to the championship series?
I haven’t seen the following explanation yet, so I’m going to go ahead and call myself a genius hockey analyst for this incredible insight.
The Golden Knights are where they are precisely because this is their inaugural year. The very first season of an expansion team is a rare one-off situation where no one has any expectations, not even the brand new fans. They’re just happy to have a team. Expectations and pressure come later. Everyone in the sporting world expects a team to fail in their first year, spectacularly, so the bar is set as low as its ever going to get. In this unusual set of circumstances, the team really has no one to play for except themselves. They just get to have fun. For the Golden Knights, the whole season has been like shinny.
Sports psychologists get paid big money to try to instill a loose, stress-free mindset in professional athletes. It’s pretty common knowledge that people perform well under pressure if they’re engaged without all the head noise that comes with the consequences of failure. The Golden Knights got this perfect opportunity to play their game and have fun. Will the next expansion team in Seattle be able to pull off this weird one-off moment as well, or is the genie out of the bottle? We’ll have to wait and see.
You heard it here first.
The Ulcer 
I have an alternate theory.
There’s a Stephen King story called “Quitters Inc.” in which a man signs up for a smoking cessation program that was founded by a New Jersey mob boss. After signing up for the program, the man learns that their technique is “aversion training”, whereby any transgressions result in increasingly painful consequences to his wife and family- from electric shocks to beatings, to death. There is constant, secret, life-long surveillance to ensure any relapse is met with said punishment.
Given the long, storied relationship that Las Vegas has with the mob, It’s pretty clear to me exactly what is going on here. Marc-Andre Fleury and his teammates clearly do not care to see their son’s testicles connected to a car battery.
It would therefor be literally more “shocking” if they were to lose than if they were to win.
I feel like Salieri after hearing Mozart for the first time. Your theory wins.