In Dallas, the visiting Vegas Golden Knights posted three goals in the first period to take a 3-1 lead over the Stars on Saturday and cruised to a 6-1 win.
“Sometimes you get fortunate in the schedule, let’s face it,” Golden Knights coach Bruce Cassidy said. “That was their fourth game this week, they were on the road in Florida and come back home. We had actually had a couple of days off, good practice yesterday. We wanted to get the right start and we did. We checked well not to allow them to get back into the game and we started well by scoring early and getting an early lead. I thought those were the two biggest reasons why we were able to get two points.”
Vegas improved to 18-5-5.
Logan Thompson made 19 saves in the win.
Vegas broke out to a 2-0 lead on goals from Chandler Stephenson and Zach Whitecloud
Stephenson scored at 2:24 for a 1-0 lead, his goal snapped a 20-game goal drought.
“Having the dads here gives you a little bit of an extra jump,” Stephenson said. “Everyone wants to play good with their dad in the building, don’t want to get yelled at after. We’ve been feeling good about our game as of late and just trying to take that into every game. It’s been a while since I scored, so it’s nice to see that I can still put it in. That one felt good.”
Whitecloud scored at 5:36 for a 2-0 advantage.
“Today some tough bounces,” Stars defenseman Nils Lundkvist said. “A tough game for everyone. We’re just going to learn from it and be ready to play a heck of a game on Monday (against the Detroit Red Wings).”
Dallas dropped to 15-8-3.
“We’re in here, went through our meetings, beginning of [the] game it felt like everyone was ready,” Stars forward Joe Pavelski said. “Then, we go and do that. To a guy, it wasn’t good enough, wasn’t anywhere near it. Time to regroup a little bit.”
Evgenii Dadonov was the lone Dallas striker. His goal rimmed the Vegas lead to 2-1 midway through the first period.
“They’re the Stanley Cup champion,” Dallas coach Pete DeBoer said. “They’re a good team. They were more than opportunistic tonight. They created a bunch of stuff. They don’t need a lot of room to create some stuff with some of the guys they have there. But we helped them, too.”
Mark Stone extended replied with five minutes left in the first to make it 3-1 to Vegas.
Nicolas Roy pushed the lead to 4-1 at 15:01 of the middle frame.
Pavel Dorofeyev struck early in the third period to balloon the lead to 5-1 for Vegas.
Paul Cotter closed out the scoring with 45 seconds left on the game clock for the 6-1 final count.
“They’re a good team, they have a lot of stars,” Cotter said. “We’ve pretty much built some bad blood between us, which is a good thing. These are the games you get up, you get excited for. You know these games aren’t going to be easy. The goals that go in are going to be weird little bounces, stuff like that. Coming in we’ve got to be prepared.”
Jake Oettinger made 20 saves in the loss.four.
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