Vegas Golden Knights: Stastny the hockey guy, other takeaways

3. First period sloppiness rears its ugly head again

When assessing and breaking down games, I tend to use a combination of both stats and the all-important eye test.

And both the eye test and the stats tell me that over the span of the last nine games the Vegas Golden Knights have developed a worrying habit of getting off to sluggish starts.

In their last nine outings the Knights have allowed the first goal of the game in seven of those, while giving up three goals in the first period in three of those nine games.

That isn’t a recipe for success at all and it reared its ugly head again in Montreal on Saturday as the Canadiens blew out the Knights in the first period.

Granted, the Golden Knights fought back as they did against the St. Louis Blues and secured a well-earned point, but you are going to lose more games than you win if you carry on spotting teams lead.

It will especially hurt in the postseason and new Vegas Head Coach Peter DeBoer will no doubt get down to work during the All-Star Break in order to try and come up with a solution for his team’s inability to come out hard in the first period of games.

On the flip side of this argument, it wasn’t like the Golden Knights were awful in this game and they were only outshot 9-8 in the first period, but they just did a poor job of executing whereas the Canadiens were clinical.

However, there is enough of a sample size to suggest that there is a problem in the first period, and DeBoer will have to come up with a solution sooner rather than later.