Vegas Golden Knights: 4 bugaboos that proved to be the downfall in WCF
There were four key factors behind the Vegas Golden Knights’ elimination.
The Stanley Cup dream is over for at least another year for the Vegas Golden Knights after they were beat in five games in the Western Conference Final by the Dallas Stars.
It was a crushing end to what had been a season full of promise and high expectations for the Golden Knights, but they more than met their match in the Stars who will now play the Tampa Bay Lightning in the Stanley Cup Final.
This Golden Knights team was built to win right now so failing to make the Stanley Cup Final can only be seen as a huge disappointment, even though that seems a baffling statement given that they are a third-year expansion team.
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However, the front office made two huge moves during the course of the regular season, moves that made it clear they were all in to win this year.
First, they sent ripples through the hockey world by firing popular Head Coach Gerard Gallant, who had led this team to a Stanley Cup Final in their inaugural year.
To make matters worst, Pete DeBoer, the former Head Coach of Vegas’ loathed rivals the San Jose Sharks and the architect of the Knights’ postseason downfall in 2018-19, was lined up as a direct replacement.
Secondly, the Golden Knights did something they had previously vowed to stay away from by acquiring a pure rental in elite goalie Robin Lehner from the Chicago Blackhawks at the Trade Deadline.
Those two hugely significant moves made it abundantly clear that anything other than lifting Lord Stanley this year would be viewed as a bitter disappointment and, ultimately, that’s exactly what ended up happening.
There were a plethora of reasons why the Vegas Golden Knights failed to get past Dallas in the Western Conference Final, but we decided to round up the four main factors behind their demise…
1. Khudobin the Unstoppable
There are many key ingredients that go into a Stanley Cup winning team.
Chief among them is a hot goaltender.
Arguably the most important position in pro sports alongside the Quarterback in Football, you can’t be successful in the NHL unless you have good goaltending.
And you have no chance at winning the greatest prize in all of sports unless you have a goalie who can steal a game or two in each series.
The Dallas Stars had all of that and more in Anton Khudobin, who wasn’t even the franchise’s No.1 netminder heading into The Bubble in Edmonton.
That distinction belonged to Ben Bishop but, ruled Unfit To Play for the vast majority of the Stanley Cup Playoffs, the burden and all of the workload fell on Khudobin.
And boy did he deliver.
While solid but not great in the Second Round against the Colorado Avalanche, Khudobin found another gear and really played like an All-Star throughout the Western Conference Final against the Golden Knights.
He pitched a shutout with a 25-save performance in Game 1, letting Vegas know exactly what to expect.
But it just got better and better from that point on.
Khudobin had to make at least 30 saves in each of the next four games of the series, including 40 in Game 3, and his heroics between the pipes led the Stars to three consecutive wins to take the series in five.
Granted, the Russian had a lot of help from his defense who did a superb job of taking away screens and rebounds from the Golden Knights, but he still made a boatload of huge saves at key moments to backstop his team all the way to the Stanley Cup Final.
If Anton Khudobin can muster up another run of games like he had in the Western Conference Final, then don’t be surprised to see the Dallas Stars lift the Stanley Cup in a couple of weeks.
2. Invisible Offense
On a team with not many weaknesses or flaws at all, the biggest strength of the Golden Knights was its explosive offense.
Or, at least that’s what we all thought anyway.
However, after showing some cracks in the Second Round against the Vancouver Canucks after laying a goose egg in Game 6 and scoring just four goals in three games, the wheels completely fell off the wagon in the Western Conference Final.
The Golden Knights just couldn’t score against the Dallas Stars.
Despite boasting a superstar in Mark Stone and an elite supporting cast including Max Pacioretty, William Karlsson, Reilly Smith and Alex Tuch, the offense was pretty much non existent in five games.
It started in Game 1 when the Knights fired a blank and they were unable to solve the puzzle given to them by the Stars for the rest of the series.
Six goals in five games by Vegas forwards tells its own sorry story, as does the fact that so many of their big guns went missing for large stretches of the series.
Max Pacioretty didn’t light the lamp for eight games dating back to the Second Round, while Mark Stone had just the one goal in the entire Western Conference Final.
It also didn’t help that the defense failed to step up and provide offense, with only Shea Theodore a regular and consistent contributor.
But it was the way this offense crashed and burned that should raise alarm bells.
While Dallas goalie Anton Khudobin was great, his life was made easier by the fact that the Knights fired pucks straight at his chest or on his pads.
They didn’t pick or direct their shots, they couldn’t set up screens in-front of net and they were awful when it came to generating rebounds.
Khudobin had to deal with hardly any traffic in-front of his net and you aren’t going to be successful if you can’t create High-Danger Chances.
Dallas did a superb job of clogging the neutral zone, resulting in the Golden Knights creating just eight rush attempts, 15 rebounds and a .072 expected-goals-per-shot rate.
That isn’t going to get the job done and, while Vegas did dominate the shot clock and most possession metrics, it doesn’t matter a damn bit if you can’t finish your chances.
It is a concern going forward and the front office, along with the coaching staff, will have to figure out how to try and avoid what should be an explosive offense slumping so badly again, especially in the postseason.
3. Special Teams
What do we always say?
You can’t win in the NHL unless you execute to a high level on special teams.
The Golden Knights failed to do that in the Western Conference Final and, as a result, they are back home in Vegas as opposed to getting ready to face the Tampa Bay Lightning in the Stanley Cup Final.
So, what exactly went wrong?
Well, there is no doubt that the power play was a huge problem for the Golden Knights throughout the Stanley Cup Finals, and it emerged as a huge snafu during the Western Conference Final.
They went a lowly 5/23 in the Second Round against the Vancouver Canucks, and failed to make the necessary adjustments for the 9th ranked penalty kill in the NHL in the WCF.
And it came back to bite Vegas in the butt.
They were even worst on the PP in the Western Conference Final, going an atrocious 3/22 in the series against the Stars.
That included blowing a couple of 5-on-3 opportunities at critical points in games, while the Knights went 0/3 on the man advantage in Game 5 against Dallas, a game they couldn’t afford to lose.
But lose they did and a weak, stagnant power play that couldn’t generate much at all played a huge role in their exit from the postseason.
As did their penalty kill.
Although stellar for much of the Stanley Cup Playoffs, ranked sixth in the NHL (85.5%), the penalty killing unit choked in two of the biggest moments in a series-clinching win for the Stars.
They gave up a power play goal in the final minutes of regulation in Game 5 with Joel Kiviranta taking the game to overtime, before allowing Denis Gurianov to score the series-clinching goal on the man advantage in OT after defenseman Zach Whitecloud was sent to the box for Delay of Game.
It was two huge examples of failing to execute at critical points in the game, and an inability to make special teams count really hurt the Golden Knights in this series.
4. Coaching Mishaps
Pete DeBoer was brought in by the Vegas Golden Knights because of his ability to push all the right buttons.
After all, he did take both the New Jersey Devils and the San Jose Sharks to the Stanley Cup Final in his first year behind the bench.
So the hope was that DeBoer would arrive in Vegas, push the right buttons with this stacked and incredibly talented roster and give them the tools to make a deep run and win it all.
However, when it mattered most DeBoer failed to deliver what was asked of him when he was hired as Gerard Gallant’s replacement.
He failed to push any of the right buttons and his inability to make adjustments on the fly proved a fatal death knell for his team.
After scoring just six goals in the first four games of the series and staring a 3-1 series deficit in the face, it was on DeBoer to devise a plan to spark his offense into life while combatting Dallas’ ability to clog up the slot area in Game 5.
However, he instead opted to stick with his guns and keep faith with a system and a style of play that hadn’t worked against a team smelling blood and keen to finish the series off.
Also, having built a two nothing lead, the Golden Knights had the chance to strengthen their grip on the game with three power play attempts in the second period, but they couldn’t convert on any of them.
DeBoer failed to make any crucial adjustments on the fly to his power play units, and he couldn’t come up with a way to shut the door on Dallas when they were pressing late in the game.
dark. Next. Rounding up best nuggets from cleanout day
A lot of the responsibility for Vegas’ exit from the postseason has to fall on the shoulders of Pete DeBoer, and he will need to learn from those lessons in order to meet lofty expectations in 2020-21.