Early goals against have doomed the Vegas Golden Knights multiple times this season, and despite flipping the script with Pavel Dorofeyev scoring 3:59 into the first period, the team was defeated 4-1 by the Florida Panthers. The loss is the Golden Knights’ sixth in their last seven games played, and the team has now started 2024 with back-to-back losses.
The simplest way to summarize the loss is to say that the Golden Knights failed to execute on special teams, and the Panthers did. Florida controlled a lot of the play and out shot Vegas 36 to 27, and went 3 for 6 on the power play. Vegas inexplicably went 0 for 6, and I don’t think there’s a team in the league who’d be able to overcome that.
Here’s a look at the expected goals results via Money Puck, and when you compare all situations to just 5v5, it really hammers home the point how different the game would have been had Vegas been able to score or stop Florida on the power play.
It also didn’t help Vegas that they followed up a 13-shot first period with 5 shots in the second and nine in the third, for a total of 14 over the final 40 minutes of play. For context, Florida had one fewer shot on the power play in the entire game than Vegas did during the entirety of the last two periods. Credit to Florida for shutting things down once they built their lead, but this is also a game where William Karlsson’s absence was felt.
The Golden Knights now sit at 22-12-5 on the season, and will return to action on Saturday at T-Mobile Arena vs. the New York Islanders.