The Golden Knights need their goaltenders to be much better

Is the shine starting to wear off the Vegas Golden Knights? While still atop the Pacific Division with 62 points, the Golden Knights are 4-5-1 in their past 10 games, punctuated by a lone regulation win in their last seven outings.

On Tuesday’s episode of Daily Faceoff LIVE, Frank Seravalli and Tyler Yaremchuk chatted about what has the Golden Knights in a funk, zeroing in on the goaltending duo of Adin Hill and Ilya Samsonov.

Tyler Yaremchuk: Let’s continue on and stick in the Pacific Division and talk about a result from last night that certainly stands out. Let’s talk about results from the last 10 days for the Golden Knights. They have four losses in a row, three of them coming to non-playoff teams in the West in Chicago, Nashville, and St. Louis. If you look a little bit bigger picture, in the last two weeks, there are losses to the Rangers and Islanders in there. Is this one of those things where we will look back six weeks from now and be like, ‘Boy, weird blip for the Golden Knights, but they are still the Golden Knights,’ or do you see some cracks forming here with this team?

Frank Seravalli: The only thing that concerns me is that they really haven’t gotten the stops. It has been all connected. Look at a lot of their offense. They have lost six of seven. They did gain a point in one of those losses in a shootout loss to the Blues last night. But they have outshot their opponent in six of those seven. They have gotten a powerplay goal in six of the seven, including multiple in a 4-1 win against the Wild, their only win. So their powerplay has continued to hum along. Their scoring, for the most part, has stayed relatively consistent. What they are on right now is a PDO bender the other way. It has been really ugly the last few weeks here. They have had a couple games where they have been close to, not lucky or unlucky, but when you have a 4-0 loss to the Islanders and your PDO is 78.9 percent, that tells you that you’re not getting the stops and you’re not getting any breaks. I don’t think their process is broken. I tend to lean toward that this is just a blip. And for one of the most consistent teams in the league, if not the most consistent team in the league to this point, no one is going to go through a pure 82-game run unscathed. It’s also just more noticeable because the Oilers have been on a heater and have now been in a spot where in that division, one week ago, you’re looking at six-point cushion for the Golden Knights that has now evaporated.

You can watch the full segment and the rest of the episode here: