What will it take for Knights to win Cup ‘back to back’?

The crowd packed shoulder to shoulder at Toshiba Plaza started up a “Bruce” chant Saturday night, but the Golden Knights coach had a different one in mind.

“Back to back,” Bruce Cassidy said, shouting into a microphone. “Back to back! Back to back!”

The Knights have spent most of the past week reveling in their first Stanley Cup championship in clubs, parades, golf courses and wherever else they can drink out of a trophy.

Alternate captain Reilly Smith said Saturday he was so happy that he could retire right there. But that doesn’t mean the people at the top of the organization are ready to rest on their laurels.

Owner Bill Foley — he of “Cup in six” prediction fame — offered a new one at the rally in front of T-Mobile Arena that concluded the team’s Strip-wide celebration. A fresh challenge for the ever-ambitious team to live up to. And one that, if it comes true, will require just about everyone to get right back to work.

“We are not done,” Foley said.

The reason the Knights spent so much of the past week enjoying themselves is simple.

They know what it took to get here. They didn’t just say “it hurts to win” around the locker room. They lived it, carrying the bumps and bruises of two months of intense playoff hockey wherever they take the Stanley Cup.

The Knights are also keenly aware of how thin the margins can be between victory and defeat. It’s not as if they didn’t have good teams before. They have the sixth-best regular-season record and second-most playoff wins in the NHL since entering the league in 2017.

This season’s group had advantages in terms of depth, determination and star power, but it still required breaks along the way to get over the hump.

The Knights did not have a skater miss a game because of injury or illness after the first round. The only potential area of adversity was in net when Laurent Brossoit was injured in Game 3 against the Edmonton Oilers, but Adin Hill was exceptional in his stead.

That good fortune doesn’t diminish the Knights’ accomplishment. Every champion needs it. The Knights also dominated the areas they could control in the playoffs, outscoring opponents 88-57 while never facing elimination.

Their plus-31 goal difference in the postseason was the best since the 1994 New York Rangers, who played more than a decade before the salary cap was put in place.

Doing that just once has already changed the Knights’ legacies forever.

“For me, it’s almost like you and your colleagues, you’ve become made men,” president of hockey operations George McPhee said. “I wish it wasn’t associated with the underworld, but that’s how you feel. You’ve won. You’ve earned it.”

Pulling it off again won’t be easy.

The Knights do have fewer questions than previous champions, with only three players who appeared in the final set to hit free agency in Hill (unrestricted) and left wings Ivan Barbashev (unrestricted) and Brett Howden (restricted). But the path back has been a fraught one for plenty of talented teams that expended enormous amounts of energy to get there the first time.

Five of the past 10 Stanley Cup champions did not win a round the following season.

The 2016-17 Pittsburgh Penguins are the only team to repeat under normal circumstances since the cap was introduced. The 2020-22 Tampa Bay Lightning reached three straight Stanley Cup Finals — winning the first two — but their journey was unique. The Lightning got almost a five-month break between the regular season and playoffs in 2020 because of COVID-19. Their second championship came after a shortened 56-game schedule.

In total, Tampa Bay played 174 games in 644 days in those two championship seasons. The Knights probably will need to play more than 200 games in about 610 days to get Cassidy’s chant to come true.

This group might be capable.

The Knights never came close to meeting their match throughout the playoffs. They also didn’t overtax any one player given their depth allowed them to spread the workload. If their will to win returns intact, there might not be another team in the NHL that can stop them.

“The thing that’s interesting is a lot of times when that team wins a Stanley Cup and they cross the finish line, they pretty much collapse,” general manager Kelly McCrimmon said. “And our guys were saying in jest, like, ‘Let’s go again. Who’s coming next?’”

Contact Ben Gotz at bgotz@reviewjournal.com. Follow @BenSGotz on Twitter.