Vegas Golden Knights: Three Big Takeaways from Calgary Cruising

2. Eakin, Stastny, Stone Hit Back

A lot of the narrative hovering over this franchise heading into yesterday’s contest was to do with the struggles of the offense.

While the top six have largely done their jobs, the Golden Knights have got very little secondary scoring and, as such, Vegas Head Coach Gerard Gallant opted to shuffle his lines during the course of the past few games.

But that, coupled with just bad luck, has led to some of the team’s big guns going through cold spells too with Mark Stone without a point in six straight games, while Paul Stastny was riding a massive eight-game streak without a goal or an assist.

And then there was Cody Eakin who, in a contract year, has struggled on a massive scale and went into the matchup against the Calgary Flames without a single goal to his name.

But all that changed yesterday as Eakin, Stone and Stastny all broke out of their respective slumps in big ways, while the second line of Jonathan Marchessault, Eakin and Stone had a Corsi statline of 8-7 through the first two periods and it was a line that finally seemed to be meshing.

Stastny ended his drought with a sublime goal in the second period, receiving a breakout pass from Nate Schmidt before deking Calgary Captain Mark Giordano and wristing a shot beyond Cam Talbot.

Then there was Eakin who one-timed a dish from Jonathan Marchessault for his first goal of the year, but then had to wait anxiously as Calgary challenged the goal for offside.

Thankfully, it was a happy ending for Eakin.

And there was also a happy ending for Mark Stone who finally got on the board in the final period when he converted on the power play, and it was a relief for all concerned to see some of Vegas’ main men rediscover their groove.