Why the Golden Knights have struggled against the Wild

The Vegas Golden Knights and Minnesota Wild are slugging it out against one another in the first round of the Stanley Cup Playoffs, with both teams picking up wins to keep the series even.

Today on Daily Faceoff Live, Ken Boehlke from Sin Bin Vegas joined the show to talk about why the Golden Knights have struggled against the Wild.

Tyler Yaremchuk: What do you attribute the struggles to? Is that part of the line mixing? Is that where it comes from? Is it on the players themselves? Is it something that Minnesota’s doing to them? What do you see as the reason why the Golden Knights have struggled to produce?

Ken Boehlke: I think one of the biggest things has just been Minnesota’s ability. I don’t know if that’s the word. It’s like a commitment, maybe it’s a better word, you were using C-words. Their commitment to staying in the middle of the ice has been really good, and the Golden Knights do not have an elite group of wingers. Like you look up and down the lineup outside of Mark Stone, there’s not a lot of great wingers there. So, they have to find ways to generate things on the outside, and that’s just not happening.

Ken Boehlke: So now it’s coming and kind of falling on the defensemen, and this isn’t a team that scores a ton from their defensemen. They get points, but they don’t score a lot of goals. I think that’s been kind of the reason why they’ve been struggling to get to the front, struggling to generate consistent offense. Even though the shot numbers are there, Corsi numbers are there, even the expected goal numbers are there, they’re not getting as many super dangerous chances as all it takes is one pass from Kirill Kaprizov to generate something more dangerous than the Golden Knights had gotten for 15 minutes there.