It was still 93 degrees in Las Vegas on September 16 when the Vegas Golden Knights opened training camp at City National Arena. The palm trees outside looked exactly the same as they did in August. The temperature gap between Vegas and the cities that get their dramatic autumnal hockey-is-coming moments, the falling leaves in Edmonton, the first frost in Minnesota, doesn’t exist here. But inside City National Arena on Wednesday, 66 days after the Carolina Hurricanes were awarded the Stanley Cup while the Golden Knights stood and watched, Year 10 began.
Ten years. An expansion team that won the Western Conference in its first season, reached the Cup Final, then spent a couple of undignified early playoff exit years before rebuilding its way back to championship contention. A Stanley Cup win in 2023. Another Final in 2026, this one lost to Carolina in six games that felt closer than the result suggests. Now a new coach, a notable trade, a goaltending question that never quite went away, and a September 29 home opener against the Chicago Blackhawks sitting ten days out.
Here is what the first day of camp established and what the next two weeks of preseason need to answer.
The Coaching Transition Nobody Panic-Assigned
Ryan Craig is the Golden Knights’ head coach. That sentence requires a brief orientation for anyone who wasn’t tracking Las Vegas hockey news closely this summer.
Bruce Cassidy, who coached the team to the 2023 championship and back to the Final this year, is gone. Cassidy’s tenure ended after the Cup Final loss, in the kind of coaching change that franchise management sometimes makes to signal a new direction after coming close without winning. John Tortorella had briefly taken over partway through last season with results that suggested a tactical difference of opinion between the front office and the original coaching staff. Craig, who was brought in as the permanent solution in June, is now navigating the challenge of inheriting a veteran roster built for championship runs while establishing his own system and authority.
That challenge is genuinely difficult. The Golden Knights roster is built around Jack Eichel, Mitch Marner, Mark Stone, and Alex Pietrangelo. Those are not young players who will defer endlessly to a new coach while they learn the system. They are veterans with championship experience, significant contracts, and well-established ideas about how hockey should be played. A new coach who tries to impose an entirely foreign system on that group will face friction. A new coach who inherits the system without asserting his own identity will struggle to establish authority when things go sideways.
Craig’s mandate, as analysts covering the team describe it, is to preserve the veteran strengths that made Vegas a Cup contender while building in greater pace and flexibility that the roster’s recent versions have occasionally lacked. He also has to determine how aggressively to involve younger players who could provide energy and speed but require development time that playoff-caliber veterans aren’t always patient with.
The preseason’s four games, a shortened format under the new CBA, provide limited data for evaluation. They matter more for establishing Craig’s system vocabulary than for any roster outcome. The real assessment begins September 29.
The Dorofeyev Problem
Pavel Dorofeyev is a New York Ranger now. The Golden Knights traded him for a package of draft picks when contract negotiations made clear that keeping him in Las Vegas would be prohibitively expensive relative to his market value. He was 24 years old, coming off a 37-goal regular season, and was the single biggest reason the Golden Knights’ power play was the most dangerous unit in the league during the playoff run.
Those 37 goals, and specifically his 20 power play goals from the one-timer spot in a configuration built around Eichel, Marner, Stone, Hertl, and Dorofeyev, are not easily replaced. The power play unit that looked nearly unstoppable in the playoffs was structured around Dorofeyev occupying a specific role in the umbrella setup that requires a left-handed shot from the right circle who can receive a feed from Marner at the point and release instantly. Finding a player who replicates that combination of shot mechanics, positioning instinct, and trust from the veteran core around him does not happen through free agency or by committee.
The internal candidates to absorb production are Ivan Barbashev, Tomas Hertl, William Karlsson, and Victor Olofsson, with young forward Braeden Bowman as a potential breakout option if Craig decides to invest in his development. None of them is Dorofeyev. The collective response required across multiple players eating smaller portions of a production gap is a different organizational challenge than identifying a single replacement. It requires different chemistry, different line configuration experiments, and different patience with stretches of offensive inconsistency that a single elite performer would smooth over.
The scoring drought question surfaced early in camp discussions. Las Vegas’s early playoff exits in 2024 and 2025 were partly precipitated by extended scoring droughts from the team’s top players. The 2026 run avoided that problem substantially, and Dorofeyev was a significant reason why. Without him, the risk profile for offensive slumps during a playoff run increases.
The Goaltending Decision That Keeps Not Getting Made
Carter Hart and Adin Hill are both in camp. Both have a case for the starting job. Neither has definitively separated himself.
Hart had a difficult regular season last year, posting a career-worst .871 save percentage in 27 starts before injuries limited his workload further. He then found another level under the coaching changes late in the season and was close to unbeatable during the playoff run until the Cup Final. His Stanley Cup Final performance in 2023 anchors his credential as a big-game goalie. His regular season inconsistency raises the question of whether a team built for a championship run can absorb whatever version of Hart shows up before the playoffs begin.
Hill won the Stanley Cup with Vegas in 2023 and was a more consistent regular-season performer before his own injury issues. Under the new CBA that extended the regular season from 82 to 84 games, there is theoretically more playing time for both goalies to establish themselves and more opportunity for a genuine competition rather than a default assignment. Whether Craig runs an actual 1A/1B platoon or effectively anoints Hart as the starter with Hill providing insurance will be visible in the preseason game allocation and the early regular season schedule.
The bolder option being floated by analysts: trade Hill and acquire Connor Hellebuyck from Winnipeg. The proposed package of Hill plus a first-round pick and Bowman would be steep. But Hellebuyck is one of the league’s premier goaltenders and the kind of elite talent that removes the goaltending uncertainty from a team with championship aspirations. Whether Vegas’s front office has the appetite for that cost, and whether Winnipeg would move a franchise goalie, are questions the preseason won’t answer but the trade deadline will eventually settle.
The Marner Factor
Mitch Marner’s first season in Las Vegas was, by his standards, excellent. After departing Toronto via free agency in the offseason before last season, Marner slotted into Vegas’s offensive system and produced at the level his career suggested he would. His playmaking relationship with Eichel in particular gave the Golden Knights a top line that teams couldn’t neutralize by focusing on one player because neutralizing either one created opportunities for the other.
His second season begins with expectations even higher now that the partnership’s potential has been demonstrated and the system around it is better understood. Marner signed a long-term extension in Las Vegas rather than testing free agency again, which signals his own comfort with the situation. That commitment matters for a team navigating a coaching change: the core players staying invested through transition rather than mentally preparing exit strategies is foundational to a new coach’s ability to establish anything.
What Year 10 Represents
Ten NHL seasons. For context: the league began in 1917. Most franchises have existed for decades or generations. The Golden Knights became a team in 2017, won a conference championship in their inaugural season, and have been among the league’s most consistently competitive organizations in the nine years since.
The franchise’s arc is genuinely remarkable. There is no comparable expansion team story in major North American professional sports. The closest analogs in other leagues took longer to reach the level of consistent championship contention Las Vegas achieved almost immediately. The explanations are multiple: an ownership group that committed significant resources from day one, a general manager who built efficiently through the expansion draft, a market that proved far more passionate about hockey than skeptics predicted, and the consistent execution of an organizational philosophy that prioritized winning immediately over building gradually.
Year 10 arrives with the franchise still firmly in championship window territory. Eichel is 29. Marner is 29. Stone is 34. Pietrangelo is 36. The window isn’t closing imminently, but it’s not permanently open either. Craig’s first season needs to demonstrate that the coaching transition doesn’t cost the organization a year while the roster remains at peak competitive age.
The Golden Knights lost the Stanley Cup Final in June. Training camp opened Wednesday. September 29 is the home opener. The score in Carolina still matters here because it’s the reason for the hunger that has brought everyone back to City National Arena ten weeks later.
Key Insights
Ryan Craig’s coaching challenge is unusual even by new-coach standards: he inherits a veteran roster with championship experience, significant contracts, and established system preferences at a moment when wholesale changes would be counterproductive but insufficient differentiation from previous regimes fails to establish authority during the inevitable difficult stretches.
The Dorofeyev trade’s impact extends beyond his 37 regular-season goals to his specific power play role in a unit built around one-timer mechanics from a precise position, a specialization that cannot be replaced by distributing his offensive contribution across multiple players who each replicate only a portion of what made the original configuration so effective.
The Hart-Hill goaltending situation represents an unusual organizational problem: not searching for competence but choosing between two capable options with different risk profiles, where Hart provides higher upside with regular-season variance and Hill provides greater consistency with a lower playoff ceiling, a choice that a new coach makes more complicated than it would be for an established regime with an established preference.
The extended regular season to 84 games under the new CBA creates both more competitive data for Craig to evaluate his roster and more physical wear on an aging veteran core whose health management, particularly for Stone and Pietrangelo, will be as important to championship viability as any tactical decision the coaching staff makes.
Sources
Las Vegas Sun Year 10 Camp Questions
Las Vegas Review-Journal Training Camp Storylines
Las Vegas Review-Journal Pre-Camp Questions
Canucks World Coaching Transition Analysis
Fanrecap Goaltending Analysis
