I don't think there was a plot to turn the Knights into an instant hockey superpower. It's easy in hindsight to say that they were given too many good players in the expansion draft, but nobody thought that at the time. I watched the expansion draft, and I recall analysts looking at the roster after it was done and saying "this is a team with some good defencemen and some scrappy veterans and some serviceable NHLers who'll play hard every night, but they'll struggle to score, and Marc Andre Fleury will be able to steal them some games, but that's about it." Nobody anticipated William Karlsson turning into a top scorer out of nowhere.
When the topic of expansion comes up, a lot of people say "baaah there isn't enough talent in the league as it is, they should be contracting teams, not expanding them." But they've built a very competitive team just by taking an expendable player from each team, so it seems like there's actually lots of NHL-ready depth that wasn't being used to full extent by other teams.
-k
It's the fact that there was expansion in the first place with so many markets struggling to draw flies. The only way this market could succeed is if the team was good.
I resent everything that Gary Bettman stands for.
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