The phrase of the year for the 2023-24 Golden Knights was “missed opportunity.” The players, coaches, front office, fans, pretty much everyone feels the same way, this team had a great chance to win it all again and just weren’t able to get it done.
The question now becomes, how will the way this season ended impact the way they approach next season?
In a Q&A with Gary Lawless on GoldenKnights.com, the head coach of the team had an interesting perspective on it.
I definitely will feel hungry. I don’t know if we were humbled to the extent that the team was and I was in 2022 because I don’t look at this year as some abject failure. We didn’t win and that’s what you want to do, but I think there were reasons for that. It wasn’t like we were 100% there and just fell on our faces. We just had some obstacles that we weren’t able to overcome. I feel like we can overcome them next year. Hungry, for sure, and I would say highly motivated as opposed to humbled. –Bruce Cassidy on GoldenKnights.com
There’s no doubt the way this season ended is much different than the way 2021-22 ended. That year, the Golden Knights stumbled down the stretch losing key games (all in shootout) to Chicago, San Jose, and Dallas. By Game 82, they’d already been eliminated and were left with a feeling the organization had never experienced before. Simply put, they were pissed.
This year, when they shook hands with the Dallas Stars after Game 7, there was more sadness, or maybe disappointment, than anger.
No two seasons are the same, but the sense of a missed opportunity is one the Golden Knights have been through on numerous occasions. They certainly felt that way when the referees made up a call in Game 7 against San Jose. There were the letdowns in 2020 and 2021 when VGK believed they had the better team in each of those conference finals. And then there was 2018, when the fairytale ended a few pages too early.
It’s different though because not many are sitting there thinking, that team wasn’t good enough and never would have been. Sure, there are questions about the methods that led to the lack of chemistry, but the team on paper was certainly good enough to win it all.
So, how will that impact next season?
It’s clearly not going to feel like last season returning to defend the Stanley Cup, and it’s not going to feel like the year before when there was something to prove. It should land somewhere in between. A team with an immense amount of confidence yet a fire to not let another year of a shrinking Cup window close again.
What does that look like on the ice? Who knows. Really wish we didn’t have to wait four months to find out.
