Analysis: How the Golden Knights improved under Peter DeBoer

By Justin Emerson

Sunday, June 7, 2020 | 2 a.m.

Golden Knights’ fans should be forgiven for feeling a little angered on the morning of Jan. 15 when they woke up to the news that popular coach Gerard Gallant was out, and heated rival Peter DeBoer was in.  

It was the most significant personnel move the Golden Knights made this season, if not in franchise history, and a somewhat strange one on the surface. But it worked.

The Golden Knights turned their season around with DeBoer behind the bench. They went on an eight-game win streak in February that vaulted them into the first place in the Pacific Division, where they finished once the league called a premature end to the regular season.

How did it happen? Was it all DeBoer?

Well, he didn’t just sprinkle magic dust on a team on a team not living up to its potential, and voila, it was fixed. He made changes, ones that may have seemed minor but ended up bringing the best out of the Golden Knights.

The most obvious example of change from Gallant to DeBoer is in the offense from the blue line. In 49 games under Gallant this season, Golden Knights defensemen had 80 points, or 1.63 per game. In 22 games under DeBoer, Golden Knights defensemen had 53 points, or 2.41 per game.

Therein lies the question: Was the spike in blue-line scoring a product of positive regression or a new coach changing the system? The honest answer is a little of both.

DeBoer changed what was expected from the defensemen, and that led to a boost in their offensive play.  

The new coach’s modifications were evident from his first practice, Jan. 17 in Montreal. The team spent a lot of time on breakouts, particularly starting behind the net and having a defenseman help lead the rush into the neutral zone. The Golden Knights quickly implemented the play into game action.

They executed it to near perfection many times under DeBoer, including on March 8 in Calgary. Watch as Nick Holden collects the puck and instead of falling back and allowing Chandler Stephenson to head up ice, does so himself and even beats forward Brandon Pirri into the offensive zone. Calgary defenseman and defending Norris Trophy winner Mark Giordano appears caught off guard while preparing to defend Pirri, and instead Holden is ready on a 2-on-1 feed from Nick Cousins for the goal.

Holden was one of the biggest beneficiaries of the DeBoer system, as he tallied as many points under him as he did under Gallant despite playing in a third of the number of games. But the most important improvement came from his partner at the time, Shea Theodore.

Theodore always had potential. There’s a reason the Golden Knights were enamored with getting him from the Anaheim Ducks in the expansion draft.

He was solid in 2017-18, showed flashes last season and has now broken out in a big way in 2019-2020. DeBoer doesn’t deserve credit for all of Theodore’s strides, but he’s certainly helped bring the best out of the 24-year-old defensemen nearly from the moment he arrived.

In DeBoer’s second game, a Jan. 18 shootout loss in Montreal, DeBoer leaned on Theodore to the tune of a career-high 28:43 of ice team. Vegas went down 3-0 in that game but Theodore had three assists to spark a comeback that saw it salvage one point in the standings.   

“We’re going to rely on him for sure and if we’re down 3-0 he’s going to play that much,” DeBoer said at the next practice. “He’s an elite defenseman and we don’t come back in that game without him.”

Sure enough, the Golden Knights also fell behind big on March 1 against the Kings and Feb. 13 against the Blues. Theodore played 26:55 and 26:27 in those games, respectively, the third- and fourth-most he’s played this season. Under DeBoer, Theodore has seen his average ice time raise from 21:46 per game to 23:16.

A coach getting his best players on the ice as often as possible may sound simple, but that’s neither the full story nor has it been DeBoer’s modus operandi.

One of DeBoer’s “non-negotiables” he mentioned in his introductory news conference was shorter shift lengths. He wanted shorter, higher-energy bursts and not to allow players to tire on the ice and slip up at the end of a long shift.

Looking at the top six forward and top three defensemen (Nick Holden was excluded because Alec Martinez’s arrival skewed the data) — William Karlsson, Jonathan Marchessault, Max Pacioretty, Reilly Smith, Paul Stastny, Mark Stone, Nate Schmidt, Brayden McNabb and Theodore— shows a clear pattern. Once DeBoer arrived, all nine of them saw their average shift length decrease and the number of shifts per game increase.

On average, they were on the ice for 2.1 seconds less per shift and took an additional .97 shifts per game.

That may not sound like much but it makes a big difference. DeBoer had the Golden Knights trade two seconds off the end of their shift in exchange for practically another full shift.

It seemed to preserve energy for when it was most needed late in games. In 22 games under DeBoer, the Golden Knights scored the game-winning or game-tying goal five times in the final five minutes of the third period. In 49 games under Gallant, it happened four times.  

These changes are now part of the fabric of the Golden Knights and will continue in the NHL’s return postseason, but one unknown is how DeBoer will utilize his goalies. The coronavirus prevented a larger sample with only seven games since the team acquired Robin Lehner from the Chicago Blackhawks at the trade deadline.

Marc-Andre Fleury started four games with Lehner getting the nod in the other three but it’s unlikely the same split would have continued into the postseason.

This is an area of DeBoer’s strategy that can’t be compared to Gallant’s. Under Gallant, Fleury played when he was healthy. A goalie-tandem was not utilized.

The obvious caveat is that Gallant didn’t ever have a second option like Lehner at his disposal. But neither has DeBoer earlier in his career.

The first year he reached the playoffs was with the 2011-2012 New Jersey Devils, which were led by Hall of Famer Martin Brodeur. Martin Jones started every game in DeBoer’s four playoff seasons with the Sharks, but the coach never had much of a secondary option to merit consideration.  

The hope for Golden Knights’ fans is that whatever he decides, they will continue to be a better team under DeBoer. That’s been an inarguable fact so far — The Golden Knights went 24-19-6 before the coaching change, and 15-5-2 after it.  

Some say a team like the Golden Knights with strong underlying numbers was destined to bounce back anyway, and that’s fair. Vegas was one of the best teams in the league on paper all year, but poor goaltending and a lack of timely scoring knocked it out of playoff position in mid-January. 

But DeBoer didn’t just come to Vegas and ride positive regression to the top spot in the division. He made changes in the system and lineup that helped the Golden Knights start to reach their potential, exactly what the front office was hoping for when they made the controversial change.