Vegas Golden Knights: Takeaways from DeBoer’s first ten
3. History doesn’t matter
Rewind back to the off-season when former Head Coach Gerard Gallant made it clear that his top six would be left untouched.
That was no surprise given how successful those lines had been, especially that top line, but sometimes change can be good.
And we have seen in the last few games that Peter DeBoer isn’t going to worry about what has been done before, rather focussing on putting together the line combinations that he feels will best help this team succeed.
The biggest example of this came on Thursday night when DeBoer rolled out a line featuring Max Pacioretty, William Karlsson and Mark Stone, which is a line I think a lot of people have wanted to see for a long time.
The new-look third-line of Chandler Stephenson, Cody Eakin and Alex Tuch also looked sharp, although Tuch took a nasty fall into the boards in the third period so it remains to be seen what his status is.
But back to that explosive line of Pacioretty-Karlsson-Stone, and it is an experiment I can see lasting.
They combined for nine points on the night, although not all of those points came while they were on a line together, and they had a Corsi of 85% with 10 scoring chances created in 10:58 minutes of 5-on-5 time.
Karlsson, Pacioretty and Stone are the three best skaters on this team and piling them on a line together makes perfect sense.
They will provide matchup nightmares for the opponent and it scary to think of the damage they could wreak in the postseason.
Next. Three prospects who could tear it up. dark
It is clear that this team is Peter DeBoer’s now and he will put together the best possible line combinations he can using the players at his disposal.
So, overall, DeBoer’s first 10 games have been somewhat of a mixed bag although a lot of the faults are not of his making.
We will see how this team looks like after 20 and 30 games of Peter DeBoer behind the bench, which should tell us a lot more about both team and coach.