The Vegas Golden Knights will put their 11-game point streak on the line Saturday night when they face the Colorado Avalanche in Las Vegas in a battle of the two most recent Stanley Cup champions.
Vegas, the 13th team in NHL history to not lose in regulation in its first 11 games, has shown no signs of a Stanley Cup hangover, claiming 21 of a possible 22 points (10-0-1), including a 5-2 victory over the Winnipeg Jets on Thursday.
Colorado, the 2022 Stanley Cup champion, began the season with six straight victories before suffering back-to-back 4-0 road losses at Pittsburgh and Buffalo. Then the Avalanche bounced back with an impressive 4-1 win over St. Louis on Wednesday in Denver.
The Golden Knights played three consecutive overtime games to keep their streak alive, losing to visiting Chicago 4-3 in overtime Oct. 27 before rebounding with back-to-back shootout wins at Los Angeles (4-3) on Saturday and at home against Montreal (3-2) on Monday.
Vegas coach Bruce Cassidy, after seeing his team outshot 27-7 over the final two periods by Montreal, was happy with his team’s 60-minute effort against Winnipeg. Jonathan Marchessault led the way with his fourth career regular-season hat trick while goaltender Logan Thompson finished with 29 saves and also picked up an assist.
“We needed to dig in a little more over 60 minutes,” Cassidy said. “Tonight, with a familiar opponent that we’ve built a little animosity with, I think is good for us. Colorado will be more of the same. A conference rival. We know how good they are, and I think they respect how we play the game.”
It will be the front end of a difficult back-to-back. The Golden Knights then fly to Anaheim to face the red-hot Ducks, winners of five in a row, on Sunday.
“It’s going to be a hard weekend of hard hockey,” Cassidy said. “Getting a tune-up like that (against the Jets) was a little harder, where we needed to check better and kill penalties, and we can carry that over into Saturday. And, to be quite honest, Sunday for that matter.”
Colorado ended its brief losing streak with the win over St. Louis on Wednesday. Mikko Rantanen led the way with a goal and an assist, Nathan MacKinnon and Cale Makar both had two assists and Ivan Prosvetov, claimed off waivers from Arizona on Oct. 9, made 27 saves in his first start with the Avalanche.
Colorado coach Jared Bednar was happy with his team’s bounce-back effort against the Blues.
“I liked our checking game, the way we played, the energy and intensity to our game,” Bednar said. “But there was, call it a 10-minute stretch in the second period where it was a track meet. We were giving up some chances and I thought (Prosvetov) was excellent.”
“I feel like we were forechecking a little bit better,” Rantanen said. “We were working harder, like getting pucks back. Everybody was kind of chipping in, and the guys who didn’t score, they were playing well. So, I think everybody had a solid game.”
After the game with the Golden Knights, the Avalanche play four of their next five games at home starting with a Tuesday night contest against New Jersey.
–Field Level Media