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The Golden Knights have struggled this season against some of the NHL's better teams. That trend continued tonight at the Washington Capitals, where Vegas lost to the team with the best record in the NHL, 5-2.
Max Pacioretty and Reilly Smith continued their hot play, each scoring for Vegas. Marc-Andre Fleury picked up his first road loss of the year, making 29 saves.
Nicklas Backstrom scored twice for the Capitals, and Evgeny Kuznetsov, Tom Wilson and Jonas Siegenthaler each scored for the Capitals.
Here are three takeaways from the defeat.
Not beating the league's best
Against teams currently in a playoff spot, the Golden Knights have a 2-5-2 record, while they are 7-1-1 against non-playoff teams. They beat the Flames at home on Oct. 12 and shut out the Penguins a week later, but other than that they have not beaten teams who are on a roll to start the year. That includes Washington, which improved to 13-2-3.
The goal differential hasn't been bad — they have been outscored 29-22 against playoff teams — but a team that fashions itself as a Cup contender won't be facing bad teams in the playoffs.
Too much time in the box
The Golden Knights have been short-handed on the penalty kill 70 times this season, which is tops in the league. And while their penalty kill ranked second coming into the game at 89.2%, the amount of penalties taken is too much. They took seven on Saturday.
Washington connected on its fourth power play to ice the game. Vegas had fended off the previous three and allowed five shots, but Backstrom scored at 11:30 of the third. Vegas finished 6-for-7 on the penalty kill.
"Our penalty kill is good because we play with a lot of energy and a lot of pace but when we're taking 6-7 penalties it's hard to keep up that high pace," Vegas' Reilly Smith told AT&T SportsNet. "We're complicating things and making it more difficult on ourselves than we need it to be."
Turnovers
The Golden Knights pride themselves on puck possession, but two turnovers led directly to goals Saturday.
The first was Jonathan Marchessault, who threw the puck to the center of the defensive zone on a no-look pass. Jakub Vrana was there to set up Wilson whipping it by Fleury to make it 2-0 Washington. The next one was Shea Theodore chasing a Capitals dump-in, and failing to clear it. Travis Boyd bodied it down and fed Siegenthaler, who netted the first of his career to give the Capitals a 3-1 lead.
Overall, the Golden Knights had seven takeaways.
"We had more turnovers than we have in the past few games and that really hurt us tonight," coach Gerard Gallant said to AT&T SportsNet.