Golden Knights' McCrimmon, McPhee 'at peace' after building Cup-winning team

LAS VEGAS – A lifetime in hockey culminates, the Stanley Cup is on the ice and being shared by players and their families, babies to grandparents, in a scene of chaotic jubilation and happiness. A few people are crying.

As they stood at the top of the mountain Tuesday, with nowhere higher to climb, Stanley Cup champions for the first time after the Vegas Golden Knights beat the Florida Panthers 9-3 in Game 5, team president George McPhee and general manager Kelly McCrimmon surveyed the celebration and thought for a moment about who was not there on the ice with them at T-Mobile Arena.

McPhee is 64 years old, McCrimmon 62. They’ve lived, and seen things in hockey and beyond. They understand challenge and loss.

In the greatest moment of his hockey life, McCrimmon couldn’t help but think of his brother, Brad, a Stanley Cup winner as a defenceman with the Calgary Flames in 1989 who was building a career as a coach when he died in a 2011 plane crash with his Lokomotiv Yaroslavl players in Russia.

For McPhee, who hired McCrimmon in 2016 to help build a National Hockey League expansion team in the Nevada desert, the person he thought of was Pat Quinn. Quinn, who long before he coached the Toronto Maple Leafs to the last thing resembling playoff success, hired McPhee out of law school in 1992 to help manage the Vancouver Canucks. Quinn died of cancer in 2014. McPhee wept at his funeral in North Vancouver.

Most of us have a sense of the Stanley Cup’s permanence. But the letters that are etched forever into its silver bands are more than just names. They represent family, even history.

“So my name will go on the Cup with Brad,” Kelly McCrimmon said. “My parents are 85 years old. I talked to my dad this morning. It will mean a great deal to them. It means a great deal to me. No one would be prouder than Brad McCrimmon with what we've done here. I feel ... tremendously just grateful for his presence and just the relationship we always had, and the love we had for one another. So, you definitely think of him on a day like today.”

Kelly said Brad’s son, Liam, grandson of Byron and Faye McCrimmon of Saskatoon, was part of the family with him on Tuesday night.

Kelly McCrimmon was elevated to general manager, McPhee’s initial position for Vegas owner Bill Foley, in 2019 because McPhee didn’t want to lose one of his most valuable employees to another NHL team.

They nearly won the Stanley Cup in the Knights’ first season, 2017-18, which had been unthinkable when the roster was built in an expansion draft that brought other teams' castoffs to Vegas.

The “Golden Misfits” and their fans bonded immediately, pushed together by the horrible mass shooting in Las Vegas that preceded the hockey team’s first game and turned the arena, in McPhee’s words, into a community centre where everyone gathered to mourn and heal and support each other.

But despite this rare relationship, which is the basis of everything for the Golden Knights, and the players’ popularity with fans, McPhee and McCrimmon began in Year 2 a series of bold, difficult and often-unpopular decisions to make the Golden Knights even better. 

“This team has nothing to do with expansion,” McCrimmon said Tuesday. “Jack Eichel has nothing to do with expansion, Mark Stone has nothing to do with expansion, Alex Pietrangelo, Alec Martinez, Nick Roy, you can go through the list. This is a team that's been built to get better and better.

“We didn't jump the fence to get here. We’ve had good teams here for a while, we've ended up in conference finals (four times in six seasons), we've got Stanley Cup winners in here. We got guys that went to the finals and didn't win. Now, we've got guys that have had a lot of playoff success. Our leadership is exceptional. 

“There's always some doubt in playoffs and in a series. That's where those handful of key moments ... it displays the character of your team and the leadership of your team. You all look at our Edmonton series, look at our Dallas series. There's different times in the playoffs where that carries you through and keeps you advancing.”

Said McPhee: “That first year, I think everybody liked this team. I don't know if they liked hockey, I don't know if they knew much about hockey, but they liked this team (and) what these guys stood for. From Day 1, this group of players ... was just a really high-character group. Great on the ice, but even better off the ice with what they've done in this community. I know why we won: because it's just a really high-character group. Who's inside that jersey matters, and we have people that matter.”

Six original Knights are still on the team six years later, although McPhee wasn’t happy that coach Bruce Cassidy chose to start five of them on the opening shift as an acknowledgement of the players’ service and the franchise’s start. One of them, Jonathan Marchessault, won the Conn Smythe Trophy as playoff MVP.

“I wish we had done it in the first year when this city really needed it,” McPhee said of winning the Cup. “But we stayed with it and kept making the hard decisions. It was never personal with anyone. It was just about making this team better if we could do that. And it worked.”

The Knights’ Stanley Cup Final loss in 2018 to Washington was McPhee’s third miss. As Quinn’s director of hockey operations – he was hired to replace Brian Burke – McPhee lost a final with the Canucks in 1994, and another as a rookie GM with the Capitals in 1998. His tenure in Washington lasted until 2014.

Asked if he would have believed when the Golden Knights began that he could win his first championship six years later, McPhee said: “I wouldn't have believed that. I just wanted a second chance. I needed a job. And Bill Foley gave me the opportunity and it gave me a lot of confidence.

“We talked a couple of times and he just called me one day and said, 'OK, I'd like to hire you. What are your expectations on compensation?' I said: 'You put a contract on the table you think is fair, I'll sign it.' And that was it. And that's the way we've done things ever since. So, for me, having your name on the Cup is fantastic. Having the Stanley Cup brings everything else. But it's all about the experience of working with an unbelievable group and delivering something to your community. That's really what matters. I'm old enough now to understand that.”

Later, when congratulated an umpteenth time amid that joyous mosh pit on the ice, McPhee said: “You wonder about it all the way through, until it happens. Now that it’s happened, I wish Pat Quinn and people like that would have experienced it. Because it’s an unbelievable feeling. It’s sort of being at peace now. I’m looking forward to just waking up tomorrow morning and saying, ‘We won the Stanley Cup last night. In Las Vegas.’ Pretty darn good.”