Golden Knights, Sharks renew NHL’s best rivalry in season opener

Ryan Reaves gave an impromptu TED Talk on the subject of rivalries and theorized there are two categories.

The first, according to the Golden Knights’ bruising winger, consists of the classic matchups that have bubbled and boiled for several decades. These would include the Original Six feuds, the 1980s Wales Conference bar brawls, the Battle of Alberta, and so forth.

“But then you have the ones that it happens because of circumstances or an event,” Reaves said.

Like, say, a contentious ending to an already heated playoff series?

In a mere two years, the Knights and San Jose Sharks have developed a mutual hatred for each other while sparring for superiority in the Pacific Division.

They’ve fought over players in the offseason, chirped in the media and turned every encounter into a no-holds-barred, steel-cage match.

The NHL’s bloodiest soap opera resumes Wednesday when a national TV audience will watch the bitter adversaries open the regular season at T-Mobile Arena before the return bout Friday at San Jose.

“You play them so many times, exhibition, regular season, and then twice in a row in the playoffs, that creates a rivalry. It’s almost automatic,” Knights defenseman Deryk Engelland said. “I think both teams both years thought they should have went on and didn’t. I think you get some bad blood just from the outcomes.”

Ironically, San Jose wasn’t the Knights’ first rival. That distinction belonged to Los Angeles, fueled in part by an inflammatory postgame quote from Kings defenseman Drew Doughty.

But the Knights-Sharks conflict was forever altered in February 2018. In the span of three days before the trade deadline, Reaves arrived in Las Vegas and Evander Kane, his long-standing enemy, was traded to San Jose from Buffalo.

“Any time you have two guys who hate each other, there’s going to be more chirping back and forth,” Reaves said.

The upstart Knights went on to eliminate San Jose in six games in the Western Conference semifinal that spring en route to the Stanley Cup Final, and the bitterness grew from there.

Defenseman Erik Karlsson, who almost was traded to the Knights from Ottawa several months earlier, landed in San Jose before the start of training camp in 2018.

When the teams met for the first time in November, they combined for 64 penalty minutes as Kane and Sharks coach Peter DeBoer were ejected for abuse of officials in a 6-0 Knights victory. Two of their remaining three regular-season matchups were chippy affairs, too.

“They’ve got a lot of loud personalities, and so do we,” Knights defenseman Nate Schmidt said. “Guys don’t like to back down, from them especially.”

And then came the Western Conference quarterfinals.

The first-round series in April was a bloody, emotional affair. Even the coaches got involved, as Knights coach Gerard Gallant called DeBoer a “clown” before Game 7 while responding to a series of accusations levied by his San Jose counterpart.

Gallant declined to comment through a Knights team spokesperson when asked whether he regretted using that word.

San Jose overcame a 3-1 series deficit and emerged from the battle by rallying in Game 7 after Knights center Cody Eakin received a controversial five-minute major penalty. The Sharks scored four goals in 4:01 of the third period before winning in overtime.

The NHL changed its rulebook during the offseason to conduct video review for all major penalties in response to the Eakin penalty.

“There’s a lot of emotional baggage with the two teams,” DeBoer said after Sunday’s exhibition finale between the two featured 114 minutes in penalties.

Knights fans were overcome with feelings of schadenfreude when the Sharks eventually were eliminated from the Western Conference Final by St. Louis and carried their angst into the offseason.

Once the NHL released its schedule this summer with a home-and-home to start the season, that was the final stamp on the league’s newest rivalry.

“You’ve got to hate every team in your division,” Gallant said last week. “I’m not going into the game looking at, ‘Well, they knocked us out last year. We want to win these two games.’ I’m trying to make the playoffs again with our group, and that’s what we’re trying to do. If they’re in our way, that’s fine.”

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Contact David Schoen at dschoen@reviewjournal.com or 702-387-5203. Follow @DavidSchoenLVRJ on Twitter.