It looked like the third time would be the charm for the Vegas Golden Knights. They were the West’s top seed heading into the Stanley Cup Playoffs and nobody seemed to be able to keep up with the team’s combination of speed and physicality. Until the Dallas Stars met them in the best of seven conference finals. While the overarching theme of “what went wrong” was obviously their lack of scoring, let’s break it down a little further.
- Mental Games
When asked about his team’s lack of scoring, Pete DeBoer admitted that he thinks that Thatcher Demko got into his guys’ head once he took over the crease in the Vancouver series. It would be hard to argue with him on that. The Golden Knights appeared to be able to score at will until they very much couldn’t.
The offence started to dry up against the Canucks, but the early advantages they had afforded themselves in the series allowed them to come out the other side. It was a very different story against the Stars as Vegas fell behind in the series right out of the gate.
It was evident after game one that this was a different Golden Knights team. They were missing their mojo and couldn’t get anything to click, only scoring eight goals throughout the five games. Granted, Dallas only scored nine, but Vegas had built their game around outscoring opponents in high-octane matchups. For the first time, they had come across a team who could actually stop them from playing their kind of game and they couldn’t adapt quickly enough.
- Anton Khudobin
It’s hard to talk about the Golden Knights’ scoring struggles without crediting Anton Khudobin. The 34-year-old career backup emerged as a hero in place of the injured Ben Bishop. He played like a possessed creature across all five games in this series en route to some stellar numbers. Dobby finished the series with a .950 save-percentage and a 1.69 goals-against-average. And when you’re already facing a confidence crisis in front of the net, running into that certainly does not help.
- Shape Shifting Stars
Nobody gave the Dallas Stars a chance to accomplish anything in these playoffs based off of the way they played in the abbreviated regular season. What nobody accounted for, however, was Dallas’ ability to be mould themselves to whatever situation they were forced into. Very quickly, the team’s identity became that they didn’t have one. They were simply going to be better at their opponents game than they were.
Against Colorado, they made scoring goals look easy, scoring five goals in each of their four wins in a series that totalled 57 goals. Against Vegas, they had to adopt a grind-it-out defence to smother the powerful Knights squad. Vegas’ secret weapon was their combination of speed and physicality, a muscle they didn’t altogether get to flex in this series.
Altogether, Vegas had their bubble popped by a team who finally knew how to match up against them. They ran into a goalie who was playing as if he were in the prime of a first-overall pick kind of career and didn’t seem to be able to get out of their own way in front of the net.