Bruce Cassidy struggled so badly in his first NHL coaching job with Washington that it knocked him out of the league for more than a decade.

Cassidy coached in the junior ranks and the minors before getting a second chance with Boston. When he was fired from that job, he was out of work a grand total of a week before the Vegas Golden Knights hired him.

Less than a full calendar year since putting pen to paper with Vegas, Cassidy and the Golden Knights were on the verge of winning the Stanley Cup going into Game 5 on Tuesday night. It would be the first championship for the franchise and the veteran head coach.

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"The rewarding part is seeing it all come together at the right time," Cassidy said after Vegas beat Florida to take a 3-1 lead in the final. "Every coach in this league works hard to prepare their team, puts in a lot of time and effort, sacrifice away from your family at times, so, that’s the rewarding part. And then to get your name on the Cup is the ultimate reward."

Almost two decades ago, when Cassidy was dumped less than a season and a half into his tenure with the Capitals, it seemed unheard of that he'd get another NHL job, let alone be on the doorstep of guiding a team to a championship. George McPhee — now Vegas' president of hockey operations — hired Cassidy in 2002, then fired him 17 losses in 25 games into the 2003—04 season.

"Most guys go through what he went through and you’d never hear from them again," former Capitals goaltender Olie Kolzig said in 2019.

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Instead, Cassidy paid his dues, first as an assistant in Chicago, then coaching Kingston in the Ontario Hockey League. He returned to the pros as an assistant with the American Hockey League's Providence Bruins, was promoted to head coach and got back in the NHL on Claude Julien's staff in Boston by 2016.

"Give the guy credit: He came back from the dead," said retired defenseman Colby Cohen, who played under Cassidy in Providence. "He grinded his way through, and he developed players. It really is impressive."

Cassidy was a midseason replacement for Julien early in 2017 and coached the Bruins to the playoffs six seasons in a row before a first-round exit last year prompted Boston to let him go. When the Golden Knights wanted a coach with winning experience, they hired Cassidy.

"If you have a team, a veteran team that is ready for winning, I’m not sure there’s a better coach right now in hockey than him," Cohen said. "He is good at what he does. His ability to adjust in game, and his ability to see what’s happening within a game and change on the fly or or pull a different lever — changing lines, getting a certain matchup changing the forecheck, changing neutral zone sets — if you do it, you are successful as a team."

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With their new coach, the Golden Knights won 13 of their first 15 games and finished atop the Western Conference despite goaltending injuries and other adversity that might have knocked them off course — like it did last season, prompting Peter DeBoer's firing as coach.

"He thinks the game really well," Vegas leading scorer Jonathan Marchessault said of Cassidy. "He kept us humble and kept us also the mindset of just one game at a time and don’t think too far and stay in the moment. I think that’s been one of the big things for us this year."

Vegas cruised through the first two rounds of the playoffs, beating Winnipeg in five games and getting past Connor McDavid, Leon Draisaitl and Edmonton to reach the West final. That is perhaps where his best coaching of the year came the night before Game 6 against Dallas. The Golden Knights, once up 3-0, had lost two in a row and were on the brink of falling apart.

Cassidy gathered players for a meeting to crystallize for them what was at stake.

"It was kind of like, ‘All right, that’s enough, let’s close this out,’" center Chandler Stephenson recalled. "So, we had our best game of the playoffs."

Better could be ahead given Cassidy's ability to prepare a team for crucial situations — like locking up a Stanley Cup championship.

"That would be the ultimate reward for me is to be part of a team that won as a team and played as a team," Cassidy said.

FIRST ON FOX: Legal experts tell Fox News Digital it makes little difference whether former President Trump declassified the documents at the heart of his federal indictment.

Under the Espionage Act, the crime would be improper retention or disclosure of sensitive defense information, not classified documents, according to former Assistant U.S. Attorney Andy McCarthy, who told Fox News Digital that he's "argued for a long time that Trump’s declassification claims are a red herring."

"The Espionage Act crime is willful retention of national defense information, not classified information," McCarthy said. "There is no actual evidence that Trump declassified documents, but even if he did, that would not mean the documents aren’t national defense information."

"Moreover, as for the obstruction charges, the grand jury subpoena required him to surrender all documents physically bearing classification markings; so, again, even if he had declassified them, that would be irrelevant because the subpoena did not hinge on whether the documents were still classified – just whether they were marked classified," he added.

Trump is scheduled for an initial court hearing Tuesday after a federal grand jury indicted him Friday on 37 charges related to his retention of sensitive documents. His indictment has led to calls for Special Counsel Robert Hur to bring similar charges against President Biden.

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Richard Painter, a law professor at the University of Minnesota, told Fox News Digital in a Monday phone interview that documents are either classified or declassified, and that the president, alongside some others, has the authority to declassify documents.

"And so if documents are declassified, then none of the criminal prosecutions that could be based on classification of the documents would survive, only the national defense information, which is a separate category," Painter said.

Though much national defense information is classified, some is unclassified – but would still be covered by the Espionage Act. 

"So I do think it's important, you know, whether documents classified or not, because if there are any declassified, then any and all criminal counts that refer to classified documents would not apply to the documents that were declassified," Painter added.

Painter also pointed out that the boxes of documents that went with Biden after he left the office of the vice president "should have been checked on the way out for classified documents and they should have been checked when they arrived at their destination."

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"You cannot remove originals of any document without violating the Presidential Records Act," Painter said. "And so, particularly when they're in a rush to pack things, every single one of those boxes should have been reviewed again immediately upon arrival at its destination, in addition to a much more careful review on the way out."

"And we need to find out what happened and make absolutely sure that never happens again, as I hope with that Mike Pence documents," Painter continued, noting that the "second issue" is the locations at which Biden’s documents were kept.

"The second issue is that those documents were held in locations where there could have been access to those documents by foreign nationals and others who were not authorized to see them," he warned.

"We need to do the best we can or the investigators do to reconstruct who was in those buildings where the documents were," he added.

The indictment of Trump in Special Counsel Jack Smith's investigation is casting renewed attention onto another, similar probe – Hur's investigation into Biden's handling of classified documents.

Several troves of classified documents, some reportedly dating back to Biden's Senate days, were found in the president's possession within the last year, including documents found at the Penn Biden Center in Washington, D.C., as well as in the garage of his Wilmington, Delaware, home. In January, Attorney General Merrick Garland named Hur as special counsel overseeing the Biden probe.

George Washington University law professor and Fox News contributor Jonathan Turley told Fox News Digital the "question is whether Hur will aggressively pursue the possibility of false statements by President Biden and whether he has requested an interview with the president."

"As I have previously noted, Biden's account of the handling of the documents defies logic," Turley said. "These documents appear to have been moved and repeatedly divided. One reportedly was found in or near his library."

"The Senate documents had to be removed from the SCIF by then-Sen. Biden. The handling of these documents suggest a purpose and knowledge," Turley continued.

"Hur can insulate President Biden by avoiding a direct interview or statement from him on these facts. It is a crime to lie to federal investigators under 18 U.S.C. 1001. With Trump, the Justice Department was highly aggressive. The public is likely to watch to see if Hur shows the same no-holds-barred attitude of Smith."