(Photo Credit: SinBin.vegas Photographer Brandon Andreasen)
The pattern is growing tiresome. It seems like every night the Golden Knights fall into a hole, climb their way back out of it, and then lose in overtime or shootout. They are on pace to set the NHL record for most overtime losses, and the history of teams that do that and make the playoffs is not pretty (more on that tomorrow).
However, as annoying as it may be, there’s still something special about the way the Golden Knights consistently come back. No team has scored more than Vegas’ 71 3rd period goals, and the +3 last night brought their league-leading 3rd period differential up to +27. They have the most 3rd period comebacks and they’ve rescued points from a losing position more than any other team as well.
There’s a serious underlying issue that has them facing deficits night in and night out, but it’s not a fluke that they keep coming back.
One reason for it is conditioning. No matter the situation, the Golden Knights always appear to be the fresher team in the 3rd period, and it’s not a coincidence. The team’s structure plays a fairly large part in it.
We are a zone team in areas, so we’re not a 100 miles an hour everywhere, where you’re emptying the tank, trying to check. I don’t want to say we’re resting because that never happens on the ice, but we’ll feed players into other players in the D-zone and neutral zone so there’s support. -Bruce Cassidy
Many teams play a man-to-man system in the defensive zone, and it leads to a lot more skating than VGK’s zone system.
You’re not in one constant one-on-one battle, chasing a guy all over the ice who may never touch the puck, right? -Cassidy
NHL Edge data backs it up. VGK are currently ranked 24th in total miles skated and they are 32nd in the league on the penalty kill.
Cassidy also says a lot of credit belongs to the strength and analytics departments. At every practice, each player wears a monitor in his shoulder pads, which the staff can often be seen going around and collecting after they leave the ice. That data is then exported and examined to help give the team a clearer picture of the physical state of the team.
You have to give credit to our staff upstairs. They crunch a lot of numbers in today’s age and I’ll meet with Doug (Davidson), our strength guy on workloads, so you are trying to monitor that. -Cassidy
In the end, Cassidy believes the main reason why his team is so proficient at coming back is their competitive drive, which, of course, cannot be measured. But, without gas in the tank, even the most competitive people can’t achieve peak performance.
It’d be great if they could just cut out the whole falling-behind thing, but in the meantime, it’s nice to know this team’s always a threat to come back, no matter how bad it looks.
