The Golden Knights do not have a long history of handing over starting positions to young players coming up through the pipeline. One place they have had success though, is the same place they are looking for it again this season, on defense.
Kaedan Korczak has played just 77 games in the NHL, including his career-best 40 games, last year. This summer, he signed a new four-year $3.25 million AAV contract that starts in 2026-27, which has him slated to outearn Zach Whitecloud and be right on the heels of Brayden McNabb, indicating the belief in Korczak is strong. With the departures of Alex Pietrangelo and Nic Hague, Korczak’s spot in the starting lineup appears to be a lock for all 82 games, assuming health.
This isn’t an unfamiliar spot for the Golden Knights, though. In fact, they made moves just like they did this offseason to pave the way for both Hague and Whitecloud to have permanent positions in the starting lineup in 2019-20 and 2020-21.
Hague’s opportunity came first, in VGK’s 3rd season. The trade of Colin Miller to the Buffalo Sabres opened up a spot that was tailor-made for Hague to step into. His entry-level contract helped the newly cap-crunched Golden Knights to fit under the cap after adding Paul Stastny, Max Pacioretty, and Mark Stone the season prior. Hague would go on to play 34 of the first 48 games before Gerard Gallant was fired.
The next year, after reaching the conference final, VGK made the big move to bring in Alex Pietrangelo. That meant Nate Schmidt, who had been Vegas’ top defenseman for the past few years, was off to Winnipeg, and Jon Merrill was allowed to leave in free agency. It left a group of five veteran defensemen (Pietrangelo, McNabb, Martinez, Theodore, Holden) and the two young bucks (Hague, Whitecloud).
Whitecloud had earned the trust of new head coach, Pete DeBoer, quickly. He went from having not played an NHL game the entire season under Gallant to starting every one of VGK’s last 16 regular season games before the COVID pause and then all 20 in the playoffs.
His minute load increased rapidly, too. In his first three games, he played fewer than 14 minutes, which happened just twice in the 20 playoff games later that same year. Heading into the following year, he was a lock to start on Opening Night.
So, heading into Year 4, there was one spot guaranteed for Whitecloud and another spot we later learned they again planned for Hague. It always looked as though Nick Holden was going to hold down the final spot in the starting lineup, but the cap crunch struck again, and the team ended up waiving Holden to open the season, again, putting the faith into the hands of the youngsters. From there, both Hague and Whitecloud took the starting jobs and never let go.
The arc of Korczak is similar, which should allow us to use the first full season in a starting role for both Hague and Whitecloud to project Korczak’s season.
Both players were given limited and sheltered minutes early in the season. As mentioned before, Whitecloud’s minute load rose quickly, the same was the case for Hague. He played fewer than 15 minutes in seven of the first 10 games, but then failed to reach 15 minutes in just three of the next 28.
21-year-old Hague played most of his games on the 3rd pair alongside 25-year-old Shea Theodore, while 24-year-old Whitecloud was given a 3rd pair spot alongside his AHL partner for the previous few years, now 22-year-old Hague.
Both Hague and Whitecloud posted essentially team-average advanced analytics defensively. They were each slightly above 50% in Corsi and expected goal share, which mimicked the team numbers.
So, to project forward for Korczak, he’ll likely find himself needing to earn Cassidy’s trust early to see his minute load increase. He’s likely to play with 28-year-old Jeremy Lauzon, and if he can follow in the footsteps of the last two before him, he should hold up just fine in the 3rd pair role.
The Golden Knights have had success paving the way for young blueliners. They fully expect good things from Korczak this season, and history appears to back them up.
