It’s hard to move on to the next hockey season when you still have unresolved questions from the last hockey season.

Usually, by Canada Day I’ve figured out what I needed to from the previous season. But this year was different. One agonizing question lingered and lingered.

How did the Vegas Golden Knights possibly make it not just into the Stanley Cup playoffs, but all the way to the Cup final?

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No other NHL expansion team had ever come close to that accomplishment. Previous first-year teams had usually been awful. So it was a surprise that the Knights were decent, and a bigger surprise when they turned out to be very good.

All year, I entertained explanations how this could be so. I asked around. Many had theories, but none seemed to really provide a convincing reason.

Some believed Vegas had been given a ridiculously good deal in the expansion draft. Fine, except the draft didn’t yield a group of NHL stars or elite international players. Calgary, for example, didn’t have to leave Johnny Gaudreau or Mark Giordano unprotected. The Flames lost Deryk Engelland.

There were suggestions the Knights played an unusually fast style. Sure, except every team in the cookie-cutter NHL plays the same style.

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Many pointed to the absence of big-salaried players, as if some egalitarian, quasi-socialist philosophy had swept through Gerard Gallant’s dressing room. A romantic all-for-one-and-one-for-all notion, but not one that would fully explain the ultimate success of the team.

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The presence of Marc-Andre Fleury was repeatedly identified as an important factor. Sure, except Fleury wasn’t even the best goalie in the league or a Vezina finalist, and many expansion teams of the past had enjoyed standout goaltending.

My frustration lingered.

Then, in late July, while driving to Prince Edward Island from Toronto, I started listening to “Revisionist History,” Malcolm Gladwell’s superb podcast. The golden retriever, Max, isn’t much of a conversationalist, and you can only listen to so much music. This is, after all, about a 16-hour drive.

Gladwell’s podcast is fascinating stuff. It even has the occasional sports theme. Like how an important footnote to Wilt Chamberlain’s 100-point game in 1962 was not just that he was 28-for-32 from the free-throw line in that famous game, but that he shot all his free throws underhanded. Then went back to shooting them the more conventional way.

Somewhere between Quebec City and Riviere du Loup, I began listening to an episode describing the difference between “weak link” thinking and “strong link” thinking. Gladwell uses this theory to critique the massive endowments enjoyed by American schools like Stanford and Harvard, while other schools struggle along with less money and are forced to make difficult choices, like serving up mediocre food to students in order to have enough money to fund scholarships for poor students.

To Gladwell, this was a crazy way to organize a post-secondary education system. He found it absurd that big schools kept getting high-profile gifts from wealthy donors, while lesser-known schools did not. He argued it would make more sense for wealthy people to give their gifts to the poorer schools. This way, the “weaker links” in the education system would be strengthened, rather the “strong links” just getting stronger with more money than they could possibly ever spend.

This was my “ah-ha!” moment. That’s how Vegas did it.

Go back to the expansion draft and the Vegas payroll. It wasn’t that the Knights were provided with star players, first-line centres and elite defenders. Instead, the players acquired in the draft, and through side deals swung by GM George McPhee, gave Vegas unprecedented numbers of medium-quality players.

In the end, it wasn’t that the best players on Vegas were as good as the best players on Los Angeles, San Jose or Winnipeg, the three teams they eliminated in the playoffs. It’s that their worst players were better.

They didn’t have outstanding $10-million players, but they had an overabundance of strong, highly motivated third- and fourth-line forwards and bottom-pair defenders. They might not have had Anze Kopitar, Logan Couture or Blake Wheeler, but they had Erik Haula, Pierre-Edouard Bellemare, Cody Eakin, Alex Tuch and William Carrier.

They had 27 players on the roster who averaged 10 minutes or more of ice time when they were used. Obviously, William Karlsson’s 43 goals helped a great deal. But the strength of Vegas was that Colin Miller averaged more than 19 minutes on defence after being a Bruins castoff. Brayden McNabb couldn’t play for the Kings, but he gave Gallant 20 minutes a night.

The Knights were not successful because their strongest links were as strong as those of other teams, but because their weakest links were stronger than the weakest links of their opponents. Vegas shared the load more equally among the players it had, rather than relying on its best players to make the difference.

Gladwell spelled it out.

Look, in the end, it’s just another theory. But to me, it’s far more compelling and comprehensive than any of the others. Vegas wasn’t an accident, but rather the result of a roster than was built in a different way to other teams because it had to be, and because the expansion draft allowed it to be.

Now on with the next hockey season.