Where do the 2025 Vegas Golden Knights go from here?

When you're in a division with two elite teams at the tippy top, it's hard for one to get too worked up about losing to the other.

But every time the Vegas Golden Knights in particular lose, it's at least some kind of existential crisis. That's because the Knights are always in Trying To Win The Stanley Cup mode in a way literally no other team is, or could be. A big part of the reason why is that, in attempting to beef up the roster over the past few years to maximize the competitive windows of a couple of forwards, they've given out big-AAV contracts and movement protection like Halloween candy, and that makes it hard to turn over big chunks of their roster these days — if they even want to.

Perhaps the first thing to consider, though, has nothing to do with the roster at all. We have to e