Vegas Golden Knights Unveil Season X Plans as the Tortorella Postmortem Rolls On

The Vegas Golden Knights spent this week doing two things at once: selling the future and relitigating the past. On July 29, the club unveiled its Season X campaign — a season-long celebration of the franchise's 10th anniversary, complete with era-themed "Anniversary Knights" games. Meanwhile, the man who coached them to within two wins of a second Stanley Cup kept talking. John Tortorella's late-July interviews about his whirlwind Vegas tenure — the midseason hire, the run to the Final, the exit — dominated Golden Knights news all week, a reminder that no team in hockey packed more chaos into the last six months than this one. Come September, it's Ryan Craig's team. Until then, Vegas is doing what Vegas does: turning even its offseason into an event.

Season X: a birthday party with a schedule attached

The anniversary rollout is thorough, even by this franchise's standards for spectacle. Five curated Anniversary Knights will each honor a different era of Golden Knights history:

• Impossible Knight — Oct. 10 vs. Los Angeles, celebrating the inaugural-season run to the Final
• Vegas Born Knight — Dec. 16 vs. San Jose, covering Seasons II-V
• Misfits to Champions Knight — Feb. 13 vs. Calgary, for the 2023 Cup season
• Golden Age Knight — March 15 vs. Winnipeg, spanning Seasons VII-IX
• Fan Appreciation Knight — April 10 vs. Los Angeles, closing out Season X

Around those, the team announced 14 community theme nights — Military Appreciation, Hockey Fights Cancer, First Responders and Black History Month among them — plus new collaborations with the Las Vegas Grand Prix, PWHL Las Vegas and the College Football Playoff. There are also seven curated ticket packages on the way, ranging from Educator Appreciation to UNLV night to a Hello Kitty crossover, because this organization has never met a demographic it wouldn't build a game night around. Chief marketing officer Bryan Harper said the campaign was built to "honor the defining eras" of the franchise while fans make new memories. It's marketing, sure. But for a team that reached its third Cup Final in nine seasons this June, the nostalgia has actual substance behind it.

Tortorella's exit, still echoing

The stranger story of the week was the continued public autopsy of the Tortorella era, which lasted barely three months and somehow contained a full career's worth of drama. Recall the sequence: Vegas fired Bruce Cassidy just weeks before the playoffs — a genuinely shocking move for a team in contention — and handed the room to Tortorella, who hadn't been to a Cup Final in 22 years. All he did was drag them through the Western bracket, past the Utah Mammoth in six in round one and eventually through a conference final sweep, before Carolina shut Vegas out in Game 6 to win the 2026 Stanley Cup in six games. Within days, the team announced Tortorella would not return.

This week's interviews filled in the color. Tortorella discussed his post-Final conversation with general manager Kelly McCrimmon and, separately, how the compressed schedule and lack of practice time boxed in his goaltending decisions during the run. None of it reads bitter — more like a coach still processing the strangest job he ever took. The franchise, characteristically, had already moved on: Ryan Craig was named head coach on June 17, a homegrown promotion for a man who spent three seasons behind the Henderson bench and was an assistant on the 2023 Cup-winning staff. Craig inherits a conference champion and expectations to match, which is either the best first head-coaching job in hockey or the most dangerous one. He'll be the third man to run this bench in a calendar year, and the first in a while asked to build something rather than rescue it.

The offseason ledger: goals out, picks in

McCrimmon's summer was defined by one hard choice: trading Pavel Dorofeyev — the team's leading scorer with 37 goals — to the Rangers on June 26 for the 26th and 92nd picks in the 2026 draft plus a conditional 2028 first-rounder. It was a cap-and-futures play, and the July 29 roster reset on NHL.com framed the rest of the offseason as an attempt to paper over that lost scoring. Victor Olofsson, 31, signed on July 1 after a 31-point season and profiles as the cheap middle-six shooter Vegas hopes rediscovers his 20-goal form. Parker Wotherspoon arrived from Pittsburgh on June 30 in a swap for Kaedan Korczak, bringing a career-high 30 points. And on July 2 the club announced eleven depth signings in one press release — Olofsson and Marc Gatcomb headlining a group that included Raphael Lavoie, Tanner Laczynski, Ville Heinola, Dylan Coghlan and Jonas Rondbjerg — restocking Henderson and the bottom of the NHL roster in a single stroke.

The rest of the outbound list: Keegan Kolesar to Detroit for third- and seventh-round picks, Akira Schmid to Florida for a 2028 third, and Colton Sissons off to Toronto in free agency. The core, though, is untouched. Jack Eichel — the subject of an August 1 essay arguing he's now the greatest player in franchise history, a claim that gets harder to dispute every year — still headlines a forward group with Mark Stone, Mitch Marner and Tomas Hertl, while Shea Theodore and Rasmus Andersson anchor the blue line. Internally, the reset pointed to prospects Trevor Connelly and Matyas Sapovaliv as the youth most likely to claim the scoring minutes Dorofeyev left behind — which makes September's rookie tournament more relevant than usual.

Roster outlook: one hole, one bet

Add it up and the 2026-27 Golden Knights look like what they were in June, minus their leading goal scorer and their two most recent head coaches. That's the bet: that Eichel's line and a healthy blue line generate enough offense that nobody misses 37 goals from the wing, and that Craig's familiarity with half the roster — he coached many of the depth pieces in Henderson — smooths a transition that would rattle most locker rooms. The counterargument, made loudly in this week's less charitable columns, is that trading your top goal scorer off a Cup Final roster is how windows close early. Vegas has heard that one before, roughly every summer since 2017, and keeps making the Final anyway.

What's next on the Golden Knights calendar

• Sept. 12-15: Rookie Faceoff in San Jose — Vegas prospects open against Utah on Sept. 12 and Colorado on Sept. 13, with Connelly and Sapovaliv the names to track.
• Mid-September: Craig's first training camp as an NHL head coach.
• Sept. 29: Opening night of the new 84-game season — Chicago at T-Mobile Arena, 7:30 p.m., part of ESPN's opening tripleheader and Craig's official debut.
• Oct. 10: Impossible Knight vs. the Kings kicks off the Season X anniversary series.

The week ahead should stay quiet — no Vegas players went to arbitration, the depth chart is stocked, and the only unfinished business is ceremonial. But quiet is relative around this franchise. The Vegas Golden Knights enter Season X as reigning Western Conference champions with a rookie head coach, a retooled bottom six and a fan base being invited to spend eight months toasting the first decade. The banner they actually want is the one Carolina took from them in June. Twenty-eight days of summer left, and then Craig gets his first crack at going one series further.