Vegas is the tallest and heaviest NHL team — is that a formula for success? (2024)

Playing against the Golden Knights is physically demanding, and that’s by design.

Imagine yourself in the opposition’s shoes for a moment. You’ve just survived a shift against the physical, grinding fourth line that consists of Ryan Reaves (6-foot-2, 225 pounds), William Carrier (6-2, 218 pounds) and Keegan Kolesar (6-2, 217 pounds). They’re three of the biggest forwards in the NHL, and opponents feel every ounce of it when they deliver hits. The three may not score much, but that doesn’t make the shifts against them comfortable.

And just when you’ve survived that shift, they hop over the boards to be replaced by Mark Stone (6-3, 202 pounds), Alex Tuch (6-4, 220 pounds) and Chandler Stephenson (6-foot, 199 pounds). Your competition just got a lot faster and a lot more skilled, but only slightly smaller. Good luck.

The Golden Knights currently ice the biggest, tallest, heaviest hockey team in the entire NHL.

The current 21-man roster weighs a total of 4,351 pounds. That’s equal to a Ford Taurus, and averages out to 207.2 pounds per player. Not only is it the heaviest roster in the league, but Golden Knights players weigh more than eight pounds over the league average (198.9 pounds).

The graphic is from a piece by The Athletic’s James Mirtle. He’s been examining the height, weight, age and nationality of every player in the league for the last three seasons.

This year, Vegas is nearly two pounds clear of the next-heaviest team – the Tampa Bay Lightning – and when compared to the lightest teams in the league, the size differential is even more apparent. The Golden Knights have 13 players who weigh 205 pounds or more, and only seven under the 200-pound mark. Meanwhile, the Chicago Blackhawks have only four players who weigh 205 or more pounds, and a whopping 18 under 200 pounds.

And Vegas doesn’t just tip the scales. Golden Knights players are, on average, the tallest in the NHL as well. With an average height of 74.1 inches (just over 6-2), Vegas towers over the rest of the league, although the height margins are significantly narrower than those for weight.

Nic Hague is Vegas’ tallest player at 6-6, but the team has seven players who are 6-4 or taller, and only one who is under 6-foot. As a team, the Golden Knights are nearly an entire inch taller than the NHL average of 73.2 inches.

So how did the Golden Knights become the biggest team in hockey, and what does it mean on the ice?

Vegas wasn’t always built this way. In fact, the inaugural Golden Knights team that made the Stanley Cup Final was much smaller. Over each of the four years, the Golden Knights have steadily gotten taller and heavier.

As you can see, NHL players as a whole have gotten lighter over the past four years, while Vegas has gotten heavier each season. The Golden Knights transformed from a team that overwhelmed teams with speed. They forechecked with ferocity and feasted on turnovers by turning them into transition scoring chances. After falling short in the Cup final to a much heavier Washington Capitals team, the front office of George McPhee and Kelly McCrimmon opted to bring in more size. That included a heavy, bruising player like Reaves, who was acquired just ahead of the 2017-18 deadline, but more so the heavier players up the lineup like Stone and Max Pacioretty, who predicate their offensive games much more on power and possession than speed.

Four years later, the Golden Knights are an average of 1.2 inches taller and 7.7 pounds heavier. They’ve gone from below the league average in both categories to tops in both.

“We were kind of joking about it today,” Stone said. “We have a very big team.”

How do they use it to their advantage?

“Incredibly well,” defenseman Zach Whitecloud said. “We’re a physical team and when we’re being physical, and all five guys on the ice are being physical, I think we dominate a lot of the play. If you can be physical in your own end first, that eliminates a lot of plays in your own end, and kind of stops the flow of their five-man unit. Once you can create a stall, you can get the puck out and get it going north.”

Vegas has been physical this season, but the hitting has actually gone down from the last couple of years. This season, the Golden Knights average 24.37 hits per 60 minutes, which ranks ninth in the league. That’s down from 26.51 last season (fourth) and 27.44 in 2018-19 (second).

The Golden Knights use their size advantage in ways other than checking the opposition.

“What helps us out is we’re big, we’re fast, and we’re able to use our size and don’t need four or five guys to win a puck battle,” Stone said. “We have guys who can win a puck battle on their own, and you can kind of spread defensive zones, to get them scrambling.”

There may not be a single area of the game in which the Golden Knights’ size advantage plays a larger role than puck battles along the boards. Not only does it allow Vegas to win more of those battles, and therefore possess the puck more, but their confidence in those situations allows them to play with a different strategy.

“It’s an important part because when you don’t have a team with that ability, you have to commit multiple people to battles, and that exposes you in other areas,” head coach Peter DeBoer said.

Committing fewer players along the boards means having better coverage in the defensive end and more chances to find open players on the offensive side. If Stone can flip a puck into the corner and knows Pacioretty can win a 1-on-1 battle for it, he can find open ice in the zone and set up for a chance, as opposed to needing to help win possession.

“I like that element,” DeBoer continued, “and I like the fact that we have that element and it hasn’t taken away from the speed of the group.”

In an analytics sense, Vegas is one of the NHL’s better possession teams. The Golden Knights regularly account for the majority of shot attempts, shots on goal and scoring chances on a nightly basis. Their ability to win puck battles leads directly to that. So does their ability to outmuscle players for the puck in open ice. Not all takeaways and giveaways are a direct result of that, but many are. The Golden Knights have the best takeaway-to-giveaway ratio in the league at plus-1.87. Vegas averages the second-most takeaways per game at 6.84 while turning the puck over only 4.97 times per game (sixth-fewest).

“We have a lot of guys who can rumble in the corners, but like you said, we have big guys who can absolutely fly,” Stone said. “I think every line is pretty different. Obviously, certain lines like to get those grinding shifts.”

Here’s how the Golden Knights’ current forward lines break down in terms of average weight:

Those reflect the lineup changes DeBoer made last week. For those curious, here are how their more traditional lines looked:

Vegas’ newly constructed lineup seems to distribute the weight a little more evenly among the lines. It combines a heavy player like Nic Roy with a smaller line featuring William Karlsson and Reilly Smith, and a smaller center like Stephenson with big, power wingers like Stone and Tuch. The traditional lineup has small, quick lines like Karlsson, Smith and Jonathan Marchessault – who weigh an average of only 184.3 pounds – in juxtaposition to one of the heaviest fourth lines in all of hockey.

Vegas was three wins away from lifting the Stanley Cup in year one, and the front office clearly felt the team needed to be stronger to take the next step. But do the numbers show that weight and height matter when trying to win a championship?

The last three Stanley Cup winners all have been among the seven heaviest teams in the league, and only one was outside of the top seven in height.

“I don’t think it’s an accident that in Tampa, the guys they added all had that heaviness to their game, and all of a sudden they’re taking the next step,” DeBoer said.

To DeBoer’s point, the Lightning were the fourth-shortest team in 2018-19, with an average height of only 72.7 inches. They were also the 23rd-heaviest team in the league with an average weight of 196.9 pounds. After losing in the first round of the playoffs, Tampa Bay added muscle to its lineup in the offseason by signing Luke Schenn (6-2, 229 pounds), Pat Maroon (6-3, 225 pounds) and Zach Bogosian (6-3, 222 pounds). Then the Lightning doubled down by trading for power forward Barclay Goodrow (6-2, 215 pounds) at the trade deadline.

Those moves jumped the Lightning 11 spots in the height rankings, and from the 23rd-heaviest team to the seventh-heaviest. Is that the sole reason they went from an embarrassing first-round exit to a Stanley Cup championship? Of course not, but front offices around the league believe it played a factor. The Golden Knights certainly do.

“I’ve always been a proponent that you need heavy hockey,” DeBoer said, “especially come playoff time.”

(Top photo of William Carrier: Jeff Bottari / NHLI via Getty Images)

Jesse Granger is a staff writer for The Athletic NHL based in Las Vegas. He has covered the Golden Knights since its inception and was previously an award-winning reporter for the Las Vegas Sun. Follow Jesse on Twitter @JesseGranger_