After another tough home loss, Golden Knights left wondering what comes next

By Justin Emerson

Wednesday, Nov. 13, 2019 | 11 p.m.

Jonathan Marchessault’s reaction said it all.

He had just been granted a penalty shot at a big spot in the game, his team down a goal in the second with a chance to reclaim some much-needed momentum. He came in wide left, slowed up in front of the net, deked, fumbled and shot it wide.

He threw his head upward as if to ask, “What now?”

That’s the question for the Golden Knights. After a 5-3 loss to the Chicago Blackhawks on Wednesday at T-Mobile Arena, the first loss in eight all-time meetings, the Golden Knights are now a quarter of the way through the season with two more losses than wins (9-8-3).

The numbers say they should be better. But right now they’re just not. And when a team has lost four in a row and seven of their last nine, sometimes all it can do is look up to the ceiling and ask, “What now?”

“We’ve got to get back to basics a bit,” forward Mark Stone said. “It’s tough, we’re losing, we’re trying to find ways to get out of it. It’s not an easy league.”

The Golden Knights came out hot for their first home game since those back-to-back collapses to Montreal and Winnipeg. They scored just shy of three minutes into the game and again at the 6:29 mark, a power-play tally on a zone-entry play that couldn’t have been better.

Chicago scored 15 seconds after that, the first big momentum-shifter.

It was a wild start to the game. Both sides played end-to-end hockey that would have anyone huffing wind when they got back to the bench. The first period saw 24 shots on goal between the teams. The first two periods against Detroit on Sunday had 19 shots on goal combined. It was fun hockey.

The second period was when the game started to turn in the Blackhawks’ favor. Alex Tuch rang one off the crossbar so clean, the official signaled goal and the horn and the music hit, celebrating a tie game. It took no time for the review to confirm the puck never went in, and the crowd sat down, deflated.

Chicago scored 15 seconds after that as well, the second big momentum-shifter. Both of the Blackhawks’ first two goals came an aggregate 30 seconds after Vegas either scored or thought it did. It’s hard not to hang your head a little when that happens.

“It shouldn’t really affect the game … but it was huge,” coach Gerard Gallant said.

The Blackhawks went on to take a 5-2 lead before Nate Schmidt added a goal with a minute left. Too little, too late.

The Golden Knights were statistically the better team at 5-on-5. They had 59.4% of the shot attempts, 56.3% of the scoring chances and 50.9% of the expected goals, according to Natural Stat Trick. But they were outscored 5-2 at even strength.

It’s been a season-long problem. PDO is a stat that oddly isn’t an acronym for something, but it measures a team’s shooting percentage plus save percentage, multiplied by 100. Because every shot is either a goal or a save, it’s a handy indicator for future regression. A team should balance out to about 1,000 every season. Much higher and a team may be getting lucky; lower and team is probably unlucky.

The Golden Knights have a 970 PDO after Wednesday’s game, fifth-worst in the league. They have the second-best share of scoring chances in the league (53.7%), fifth-best rate of expected goals (53.0%) and eighth-best Corsi (52.0% but are only scoring 41.8% of the goals at 5-on-5, third-worst in the league). A team shooting percentage of 6.6% (fourth-worst) doesn’t help.

“The chances are there — the puck’s not going in,” forward Reilly Smith said. “That’ll happen throughout a season. It’s long and we’ll go through waves where it’s going in sometimes and not going in others.”

It’s easy to say stay the course and say everything should work out fine. The Golden Knights took a proactive approach Wednesday, jumbling the lines in an attempt to make something, anything, work. Max Pacioretty, William Karlsson and Smith were good as a line. Marchessault, Cody Eakin and Stone were not.

But something isn’t right with them. This is a team that should be and still can be a contender to win the Pacific Division and even the Stanley Cup. The numbers back up the idea that they are, and over 82 games it should balance out.

Through 20 games, though, it just feels like too often the Golden Knights find themselves looking at the ceiling and asking, “What now?”