Another marquee name has joined the free-agent coaching pool.

Bruce Cassidy, coincidentally, replaced Peter DeBoer behind the Vegas Golden Knights’ bench four years ago. Now they are two of the top names available to any team considering a coaching change this offseason.

The surprise wasn’t that the Golden Knights made a change, though. A lot of people had started to wonder if they would. Cassidy had been there for four years, and the team had been struggling. I speculated about the possibility last week.

Still, it was a surprise that it happened now, so late in the regular season. I thought it would be an offseason move if Vegas bowed out early in the Stanley Cup playoffs, but by making this move now, an always unafraid Golden Knights front office is indicating it wasn’t sure the playoffs were a given. The season needed saving.

And that it’s John Tortorella going behind the bench in Vegas surprised everyone, to be sure. I wasn’t sure we’d see him coach again. The fiery Torts is 67, and things didn’t end smoothly with the Philadelphia Flyers last season before he got fired. Then again, when do things ever end smoothly when you get fired?

As surprising as the move was, it’s not without precedent. One notable example is the 2000 New Jersey Devils, in which general manager Lou Lamoriello replaced Robbie Ftorek with Hockey Hall of Famer Larry Robinson with eight games left in the regular season. The Devils went on to win the Stanley Cup.

What was even more stunning at the time was that New Jersey was first in the conference, but had won only six of its past 16 games before Lamoriello made the move.

So yeah, when Vegas made its stunning announcement Sunday, it brought back memories for a few people.

“Yeah, you always think back,” Lamoriello told The Athletic on Monday morning. “You always know how very, very difficult it is to do something like that. If you recall, we were in first place. When you feel you have a team that has a chance to win, and where you’re at in the season, and if you don’t feel it’s going to go in the right direction, for whatever reasons you have — and you have to have reasons — you can’t just sit there.

“But it can go the other way, too. And you know the positives and negatives. But you can’t look at that. If you’re in this game to win, in the (GM) seat you’re in, you have to do whatever you think is right for the team, no matter what the repercussions might be on you — whatever the result is.’’

Well, the result was a Stanley Cup. Imagine what Robinson’s reaction would have been that same day in March 2000 had he been informed his team would go on to win the Cup two and a half months later.

“I probably would have driven off the road,” Robinson, laughing as he recalled that day in March 2000, told The Athletic on Monday morning. “But truthfully, isn’t that why we do what we do? To eventually win a Cup. You want to win a Cup. If that’s not your feeling going in, then you don’t deserve the job.”

Lamoriello said the toughest thing in the moment was letting go of a person in Ftorek who had done a lot for him.

“The respect I had for Robbie and the job that he had done in our organization, that’s difficult,” Lamoriello said. “I’m sure the feeling there for him is that it could have happened with him (winning the Cup). And you never know. That’s the tough decision that has to happen.”

Undoubtedly, this was a hard decision for Vegas GM Kelly McCrimmon and president of hockey operations George McPhee. But look at the coaching bump the Columbus Blue Jackets got from turning to 71-year-old Rick Bowness midway through this season. Perhaps the Golden Knights will find similar success from a veteran like Torts. I would imagine that will indeed be the case. The Knights are a better team than they’ve shown, especially since the Olympic break.

And as Lamoriello says, you just feel it as GM that something is off. You know.

“Only they know what their reasons were, and they’re certainly two extremely confident people,” Lamoriello said. “I’ve had George and certainly have a great relationship with Kelly. So they work at it. As you know, over the years, they’re not afraid to make decisions to go forward.”

Certainly, neither was Lamoriello in his time.

A key difference in the two situations is that Robinson was already on the bench as an assistant, in charge of the defense. He wasn’t coming in cold when named head coach.

“I was on the bench with Robbie Ftorek, and I love Robbie. He’s a great guy,” Robinson said. “I learned so much from him behind the bench. The only thing I knew, though, is that he was kind of not holding everybody accountable. He would let the stars get away with a little more than everybody else.

“You could sort of feel the tension.”

And then with eight games left in the season, Robinson’s phone rings.

“I get in the car to go to practice one morning, and Lou calls,” Robinson recalled. “He said, ‘Larry, I’ve decided to make a change.’ And I said, ‘Oh oh, I’m gone.’ And he said, ‘No, I’m letting Robbie go, and I would like you to take over coaching the team.’ I went, ‘Holy crap.’”

So late in the season, it’s hard to overhaul a system completely with so little practice time. The question is: What does a head coach do to bring change?

“Well, in my case, it was probably a little easier than it will be for Torts because Torts wasn’t there,” Robinson said. “He’s coming into a new situation, whereas I was already there. For me, I had a few ideas that I wanted to try.”

But more importantly, Robinson wanted to make something very clear in his very first meeting with the players.

“The first thing that I did, and I still get goosebumps over it, there was a lot of talk amongst the guys and in the media that the Devils don’t have any leadership and so on and so forth,” Robinson recalled. “When I went to the rink that morning, I got everybody around, and I said, ‘OK, enough is enough. You got one guy fired. Everybody is saying we don’t have a leader. You guys have probably the best leader and the best captain.’ And I pointed right at Scotty Stevens. ‘That’s your leader right there. So stop all the bitching and let’s start playing.’”

They sure did. And as Robinson recalled, Stevens was an absolute beast for them en route to the Cup.

Can Torts find the same magic from his top guys in Vegas? We’re about to find out.