The sun hasn’t yet set on the season for the Vegas Golden Knights, but it’s getting to be very late in the afternoon.
The Golden Knights are no strangers to adversity. In the regular season, they survived nine different stretches of three or more losses, a bottom-five goaltending rotation, and long-term injuries to key players. Ultimately, this added up to a year full of underachievement, and, in a desperate attempt to break through, one of the more memorable Hail Marys in the history of the National Hockey League.
With just eight games remaining in the regular season, the Golden Knights made a coaching change. Despite being in a playoff position, they relieved Bruce Cassidy of his duties as head coach and brought in John Tortorella.
There were a million ways this late-season coaching change could have gone wrong, and a million reasons that it should have. But it didn’t.
With Tortorella behind the bench, the Golden Knights ended the regular season on a 7-0-1 run. In Round 1, they battled through close calls against the Utah Mammoth and came out victorious. In Round 2, they dispatched the Anaheim Ducks in six games, which were so unremarkable that the biggest bit of news was that they lost a second-round draft pick for refusing to speak with the media after their Game 6 win. And in the Western Conference Final, the Golden Knights shocked the world and swept the Presidents’ Trophy-winning Colorado Avalanche.
But now, down 3-2 to the Carolina Hurricanes in the Stanley Cup Final, the Golden Knights face their biggest challenge yet.
John Tortorella isn’t concerned about the predicament his team is in. Following Thursday’s Game 5 loss, he took the stand and vowed that his team would return to Raleigh for Game 7.
“We’ll be back here,” he swore. “We’re just gonna do it in a different order… I’m gonna leave my clothes here, that’s for sure. They’ll be at the hotel.”
A Mark Messier guarantee for a Game 6 victory wasn’t the on
