Marner and the Golden Knights are hockey's biggest villains

Certain teams become reviled by everyone outside their immediate fan base simply because they are too damn good.

They don't suffer through long stretches of hopelessness, they usually come up big in the playoffs, and every time you think they might have done something foolish, it somehow comes up aces.

The Dodgers of today. The Patriots of the recent past. The Yankees of the less recent past.

The Vegas Golden Knights have reached this point with remarkable haste.

They've made the playoffs eight times in their nine-year existence. They made the Stanley Cup Final in their first season, thanks in part to an expansion draft that was juiced in their favor, and won the Cup in their sixth year. That must have been a painful five-year drought between finals appearances for their fans.

They've been as far as the conference finals five times - in more than half of their seasons! - and now are in their third Cup Final, having completed a sweep of the once-dominant Colorado Avalanche on Tuesday night.

That leaves the rest of the hockey world - particularly fans desperate to see their team go on this kind of postseason run even once - thinking: "Again with these friggin' guys? No thanks!"

This season has been particularly egregious from the perspective of the non-Vegas supporter. The team's big offseason acquisition was Mitch Marner, added on a massive contract via sign-and-trade after a brilliant career in Toronto that was nevertheless weighed down by the Maple Leafs' persistent playoff failures.

This maintained Vegas' reputation as a second-chance saloon for stars who eventually get tired of playing for teams that can't quite get over the playoff hump. Looking at you, Mark Stone and Jack Eichel.

The Golden Knights did appear to have question marks in goal, so they signed Carter Hart. The former Philadelphia Flyers star had been out of the league for nearly two years after allegations he'd been involved in a group sexual assault, and he eventually faced criminal charges in an Ontario court. He was acquitted, along with the other four defendants from Canada's 2018 world junior team, before re-entering the NHL. Whatever one thinks of the merits of that case, the fact remains that Hart went from out of the league and on the witness stand to the Stanley Cup Final in less than a year.

His signing wasn't the only gamble. After a fairly mediocre regular season in which the Golden Knights were bailed out by a lot of late comebacks, they fired coach Bruce Cassidy with just eight games left in the season and replaced him with notorious crank John Tortorella. "That old dinosaur? Good luck," the rest of the league must've thought. Vegas went 7-0-1 under Tortorella to finish the regular season and won its first two playoff series in six games each before sweeping Colorado.

(Adding to the villain vibes, the Golden Knights are refusing to let other teams talk to Cassidy, who's still under contract, about other coaching jobs.)

And then there's Marner's rebirth in the desert. At this time last year, as Marner reached unrestricted free agency after another woeful Maple Leafs playoff exit, Toronto fans were steeling themselves for the possibility that he would waltz into another lineup and immediately taste the postseason success that had for so long eluded him with his hometown team.

But even people who expected that probably weren't prepared for this.

Marner is leading the points race in the playoffs, he has the best plus/minus, and he also scored the absolute best goal of the postseason: his breakaway backward between-the-legs number against Anaheim in the second round. He has seven goals in 16 playoff games with Vegas after scoring just 13 in 70 postseason games with Toronto.

He's the current favorite for the Conn Smythe Trophy, for heaven's sake.

There is no escaping the fact that Marner, along with Auston Matthews and William Nylander, came in for piles of criticism over the years in Toronto after all those Game 7 losses where the offense disappeared in key moments.

But it's also true that Marner was one of the leaders of a team that repeatedly face-planted at the worst possible times. Even many of those who wore Marner jerseys at Scotiabank Arena had to admit, by the end, that it probably wasn't going to happen for him in the postseason in Toronto.

Was it the pressure of playing in a crazed hockey market? Is it that much easier to be relatively anonymous in Vegas, where the fans (and media) only have the vaguest idea of what it's like for the team to be disappointing? Does his current club simply have elements that his Leafs teams never did?

Whatever the case, Mitch Marner is four wins from the Stanley Cup. Buckle up, Leafs fans: It can only get worse from here.

Scott Stinson is a contributing writer for theScore.