{"id":591025,"date":"2026-04-07T10:23:07","date_gmt":"2026-04-07T10:23:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/591025\/"},"modified":"2026-04-07T10:23:07","modified_gmt":"2026-04-07T10:23:07","slug":"the-weirdest-team-in-the-nhl","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/591025\/","title":{"rendered":"The weirdest team in the NHL"},"content":{"rendered":"

Since their inception in 2017, the Vegas Golden Knights have been the model of success in the National Hockey League.<\/p>\n

They\u2019ve won a Stanley Cup, made four trips to the conference finals and only missed the playoffs once. The Knights are almost certainly going to make it to the playoffs this year, but that doesn\u2019t mean that they\u2019re happy with where they\u2019re at ahead of the postseason. <\/p>\n

Vegas made waves last week when it fired head coach Bruce Cassidy and hired the fiery John Tortorella to replace him. Canning a coach this close to the playoffs as a playoff team is practically unheard of. <\/p>\n

But something has been amiss with Vegas all year long. The Golden Knights rank just 19th in the league in points percentage heading into Monday\u2019s games, only have 27 regulation wins, have a goal differential of plus-seven and have been banking loser points. The bottom has fallen out since the Olympic break for the Golden Knights, who are 8-10-2 in that span and 26th in points percentage. <\/p>\n

Firing Cassidy amid a slump is a panic move for a team that really isn\u2019t that bad. Far from it actually. <\/p>\n

Vegas continues to be one of the league\u2019s best teams when it comes to dominating play and actually have the best expected goals share (59 percent) since the Olympic break. The Golden Knights\u2019 special teams units also both rank in the top 10 in the league overall. Vegas still has some of the same faces from the team that won the Cup, like Mark Stone, Jack Eichel and Shea Theodore. Plus, Mitch Marner has excelled in his first year in Vegas, and Pavel Dorofeyev has really come into his own. So what gives?<\/p>\n

Part of it is due to injury, as the Golden Knights lead the league in man games lost to injury<\/a>. Stone and Eichel have both missed some time this year, William Karlsson has played just 14 games, Alex Pietrangelo has been out for the year and starting goaltender Adin Hill was sidelined for nearly three months. Still, you would expect the impact of those injuries to show up in the underlying numbers, and that hasn\u2019t happened. <\/p>\n

Whenever a team with good underlying numbers underachieves, it\u2019s usually because it\u2019s either struggling to turn chances into goals or poor goaltending. Vegas has completely collapsed in both areas recently. PDO is a measure of a team\u2019s \u201cluck\u201d by combining shooting and save percentages where 100 is average. At five-on-five, Vegas ranks 29th in PDO overall (98.0) and 30th since the Olympic break (96.0). <\/p>\n

Let\u2019s start with the goaltending, which has been a problem all year. Vegas has had three different goaltenders start double-digit games this season, and all three have allowed more goals than expected. Hill, who was between the pipes when Vegas won its Cup in 2023, has struggled immensely. Among the 54 goaltenders that have played at least 25 games, he ranks 51st in Goals Saved Above Expected at minus-15.3, per hockeystats.com<\/a>. Hill\u2019s struggles are worrying, not only because he\u2019s supposed to be their franchise goaltender, but also because he\u2019s getting paid $6.25 million per year through the 2030-31 season. <\/p>\n

Behind him, Akira Schmid (minus-4.6 GSAx) and Carter Hart (minus-4.44 GSAx) haven\u2019t fared much better. No team has a worse save percentage at five-on-five on the year than Vegas (.886). <\/p>\n

It\u2019s not as if the Golden Knights have been playing abysmal defense in front of their goaltenders, either. They allow the fewest expected goals per 60 at five-on-five (2.29) and the fourth-fewest shot attempts. It\u2019s squarely on the goaltenders. <\/p>\n

It also doesn\u2019t help that Vegas\u2019 finishing has completely tanked post-Olympic break as well. Vegas is 30th in five-on-five shooting percentage in that span and has scored just 56 goals on 72.1 expected at all strengths. <\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Tomas Hertl is basically the embodiment of who Vegas is as a team right now. Hertl is still a top-line-caliber forward, but he\u2019s been unbelievably unlucky this year. Despite having a 55.6 percent expected goals share, Hertl has been outscored 39-50 at five-on-five, thanks to an .855 on-ice save percentage. Even worse, Hertl is Vegas\u2019 leader in expected goals at all strengths with 34.8, but he\u2019s only scored 24 times. It\u2019s especially bad at five-on-five where he\u2019s scored just five goals. Out of the 151 forwards that have played at least 900 minutes at five-on-five, Hertl\u2019s 0.31 goals per 60 rank 148th. <\/p>\n

There\u2019s also a divide between Vegas\u2019 top six and bottom six. Finding exact numbers on this is difficult, but let\u2019s use Eichel and Marner to represent Vegas\u2019 top two lines. They\u2019ve only spent about 150 minutes together, and Vegas has crushed it when they\u2019ve played together. Both players also have an expected goals share of roughly 57 percent away from each other as well as positive goal differentials (plus-19 for Marner, plus-13 for Eichel). <\/p>\n

But without either player, Vegas has really struggled. Its expected goal share drops to 49.6 percent, and it\u2019s a bloodbath on the scoreboard. Without Marner and Eichel, Vegas is getting outscored 93-54. It\u2019s hard to hide that kind of disparity, especially in the playoffs. <\/p>\n

On the whole, Vegas should be one of the best teams in the NHL, let alone the Western Conference. But the Golden Knights are being held back by their goaltending and a cold streak at the other end, and Cassidy paid the price for it. The question is if a coaching change is enough to reverse their fortunes. <\/p>\n

Stats are from Natural Stat Trick unless noted otherwise<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Since their inception in 2017, the Vegas Golden Knights have been the model of success in the National…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":591026,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[556],"tags":[64,63,575,85],"class_list":{"0":"post-591025","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nhl","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-nhl","11":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/591025","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=591025"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/591025\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/591026"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=591025"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=591025"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=591025"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}