How George McPhee evolved to win the Stanley Cup after 40 years in the NHL

LAS VEGAS — As George McPhee lifted the Stanley Cup above his head, he was overcome with an array of emotions.
“It was humbling,” he said. “Actually picking up the Cup, in some ways you don’t feel like you’re worthy.”
The moment for the Golden Knights’ president of hockey operations came 40 years after his debut as a player in the NHL, and after 30 years of working in management.
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“I’ve heard people say it’s validation and that sort of thing,” McPhee explained. “For me, it’s almost like you and your colleagues become made men. I wish it wasn’t associated with the underworld, but that’s how you feel. You’ve won. You’ve earned it.”
The mafia initiation vibes have subsided in the days since June 13, as the championship truly sets in. McPhee said his TV was tuned to the NHL Network all day long, watching a loop of highlights and analysis of his long-awaited title.
“You keep seeing it over and over again,” he said. “We actually won the Stanley Cup. It’s a pretty amazing feeling.”
Decades of trying to win that trophy have taught McPhee a lot, and built up a lot of callus. He’s constructed many talented teams over the years that crashed and burned in the playoffs. Those experiences resulted in a level of cynicism, almost a disbelief that he could ever actually win it all. Even in the final frame of the Golden Knights’ blowout win in Game 5 over Florida, with his team up by as many as six goals and never fewer than four, McPhee still had doubts.
“I was wound so tight,” McPhee said. “This was my fourth time in the Stanley Cup Final, and I hadn’t won so I know how things can change and how much it can hurt if you don’t win. It was hard for me to let go until we actually won.
“You always worry about what could go wrong. The bigger the lead, the more of a disaster it will be if you don’t win.”
McPhee lost in the Cup Final in 1994 with the Canucks and again with the Capitals in 1998, but the most recent defeat was the most painful. In 2018, he helped lead the Golden Knights to within three wins of a championship in their inaugural season, but fell short to the Washington Capitals — the team he largely built himself. McPhee managed the Capitals for 17 seasons, winning seven division titles and making 10 playoff appearances. Each time, his ultra-talented Capitals teams failed to win it all. In 2018, that group finally broke through, and did it against McPhee’s new team.
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“That was hard,” McPhee said. “I sure didn’t need that baggage, but if it wasn’t going to be us, you could live with it being them. After years of knocking on the door, they finally won.”
The makeup of that Capitals team — compared to this year’s championship Golden Knights squad — is a perfect example of how much McPhee has grown and evolved as a manager over his long career in the front office.
The 2017-18 Capitals were full of players McPhee selected high in the entry draft and developed for years in Washington. He took Alex Ovechkin with the No. 1 overall pick in 2014. Evgeny Kuznetsov, Nicklas Backstrom, John Carlson and Tom Wilson were also first-round picks made by McPhee. In total, the Capitals had 11 first-round picks on the roster, and its top four scorers were all taken by McPhee. That was his philosophy in Washington: Draft and develop.
“In a lot of ways, the players are like your kids,” he said. “You work with them, you develop them. You can work with them for 10 to 15 years, because they can play that long, and at least with that organization, we kept players there for a long time.”
The qualifier was important, because it’s not how McPhee has operated as general manager and president of hockey operations in Vegas. Before he arrived in Las Vegas, he shied away from most high-priced free agents and hadn’t made many blockbuster trades over his long career. The opportunity to build a team from the ground up, with no previous staff or player contracts in place, was tantalizing.
“I think you have to be really open-minded about how you approach things,” McPhee said. “I remember coming here and I had sort of the models in my head for how we were going to run things and how we were going to shape each department and so on. When you get your staff together, you realize there are different ways to do things, and the models turned out to be — not in every instance, but in several — different than what I had envisioned. But that’s OK. It was a better way to do things.”
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Not only did McPhee’s new counterparts help reshape some of his views, but the team’s unexpected success right out of the gate shifted the organization’s timeline for winning. In the expansion draft, McPhee and then-assistant general manager Kelly McCrimmon harvested a bushel of future assets. They acquired several first-, second- and third-round draft picks with an eye on building a strong team over years of drafting and development.
Then the first year team went to the Cup Final, and their plans changed.
“When we got to how we were going to run the team, we just realized that we had a good team that first year, but was it sustainable?” McPhee said. “Could they keep winning? Could they win a Cup? We felt like we needed other pieces to get there.”
Rather than waiting for the newly-drafted prospects to grow into impact players down the road, McPhee and McCrimmon used them to improve immediately. They traded Nick Suzuki to Montreal to bring in an immediate goal-scorer in Max Pacioretty. They traded Erik Brannstrom to Ottawa for Mark Stone, who came in and was instantly the best player on the team.
McCrimmon signed Alex Pietrangelo to a mega seven-year, $61.6 million contract to start the free agency period in 2020. The deal, which takes Pietrangelo to the age of 37, is the type of contract McPhee might’ve avoided earlier in his career. McCrimmon then made Vegas’ biggest move of all in November of 2021, trading Alex Tuch and several future assets to acquire a franchise center in Jack Eichel.
“Kelly, when he became the GM, became really aggressive in trying to get those big pieces,” McPhee said. “He had guts. He had guts to see what he wanted, and he was relentless in getting it. If the guy was there, he was going to make it happen. I give him a lot of credit for that. There was risk in some of those deals. If Jack Eichel had come here and that surgery didn’t work, we might not be employed.”
The aggression paid off. There were certainly some bumps along the way. The team had to trade several high-priced players away for nothing in return to manage the salary cap. The pandemic-induced flat salary cap didn’t do general managers around the league any favors, and the Golden Knights were hit particularly hard by it.
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“We’ve never looked the other way on anything,” McPhee said. “We had to make tough decisions and we made them. We were criticized, but that’s the job. If you can’t take it, you shouldn’t be doing the job.”
McCrimmon and McPhee came out of it with a championship, their core players still under contract and arguably not a single bad deal currently on the books.
“It’s the quality of that staff, for me, that carries a lot of the decisions that we make,” McCrimmon said. “There are a lot of decisions that you make as a manager. For me, it’s never about one tremendous decision. It’s about a series of good decisions. You need the conviction to believe in them. I think we’ve done that really consistently throughout and I think that’s a big reason why we sit here today.”
The final piece of the championship puzzle was the man behind the bench, Bruce Cassidy. The hiring was another display of McPhee’s growth over his decades in hockey. McPhee gave Cassidy his first NHL head coaching job with Washington in 2002. Less than two seasons later, he had to fire him.
“I didn’t want to fire the man because I thought he was a really good coach,” McPhee recalled. “I felt guilty about it because it was a hard team to coach. We had some tough personalities on that team. We didn’t have the character on that team that I wish we had. Things weren’t going the right way and a change had to be made. I wish I could’ve traded eight players instead. I guess where I am now in my career, a little older, that’s probably what I would’ve done, but back then I didn’t have that confidence.”
Cassidy didn’t get another NHL head coaching job until 12 years later, after working his way back up through minor hockey and the American Hockey League.
“I took all kinds of heat after hiring him when it didn’t work out, and he had to go and start all over again,” McPhee said. “The man was a really good coach, and a really good guy, and he just got buried.”
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Two decades after McPhee hired Cassidy the first time, he suggested McCrimmon look strongly at hiring him in Vegas this past offseason. Both had grown a lot since the last time they worked together, and that was apparent in the interview process.
“When I had him in Washington, he believed he could be a good coach,” McPhee said of Cassidy. “Talking to him now, he knew he was a good coach. It was a big difference in confidence when you walk into a room, dealing with pro athletes.”
Cassidy turned out to be the perfect hire, winning the Cup for the first time in his long hockey career, along with McPhee and McCrimmon. It was a night more than 40 years in the making for McPhee, but his celebrations were subdued. His reputation over the years was being one of the most fiery people in management, and if you catch him during a hockey game, you can see that emotion, but finally a champion, he celebrated quietly.
He joined the players on the ice, and stood in the corner away from the action in the dressing room while they showered themselves with champagne. He followed them over to OMNIA nightclub at Caesars Palace after, but stood on the sidelines and chatted with friends while his daughter enjoyed the music. Over the seven hours of celebration, he had only three beers, which he says is a big night for him.
“It’s still hard to believe that the Vegas Golden Knights won the Stanley Cup,” McPhee said. “Holy cow. But you wake up every day and it gets a little bit better, in the sense that we’re in a different place. We’ve won a Cup. It just can’t ever be taken away from you now. I’ve heard that expression so many times from so many people, but it’s the truth. You did it. You’re those made men.”
(Photo of George McPhee: Dave Sandford / NHLI via Getty Images)
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