In Denver, the Vegas Golden Knights posted two first period strikes from Chandler 
Stephenson and Reilly Smith en route to a 3-1 win over the Colorado Avalanche on Tuesday night.
Robin Lehner made 26 saves for the Vegas win.
“We needed a win,” Vegas head coach Peter DeBoer said. “We’ve been putting in some pretty good work. We had an opportunity to win a couple of the last few games in the third period and didn’t do it. We needed one. Really short bench in the third and a lot of tired guys, but guys dug deep and really proud of the effort.”
The win snapped a four-game skid by the Knights who lost the four straight after winning opening night.
“Big one for Robin,” DeBoer said. “Robin’s been really solid, but he needed to get rewarded with a win and he needed some goal support, and we haven’t given him that. He got both of those tonight.”
Cale Makar scored his first of the season for the Avs’ only goal. It came in the second period.
“We’re sort of stumbling and bumbling along right now, so there’s a level of concern,” Avs head coach Jared Bednar said. “It’s not like, ‘Well we just didn’t play good tonight and (we’re) moving on to the next (game).
“To me, this is a big game because part of what we talked about today was that if we win tonight and we’re able to get to .500, now we can start (moving) above .500 if we do our job. If you lose, you drop two games back, and now we’ll see how long it takes us to get back (to .500). It could be seven days, it could be 10 days, it could be a month.”
The Golden Knights were 0-for-3 with the power play; the Avs were scoreless in two chances.
“It was a gutsy effort,” DeBoer said. “Tough building, great team. We committed to defending hard and you need to against that team. We got some timely saves and a couple of big goals. Good formula for us.”
Keegan Kolesar added a late empty-net goal in the third period for the 3-1 final.
“We played really good defensively,” Stephenson, said. “That’s Vegas hockey, how we played tonight. Taking their time and space away and making smart plays. About time the whole game came together.”
Darcy Kuemper made 26 saves in the loss.
“There’s no panic at all,” Makar said. “We’re [six] games in and we could win the next [76 games]. Obviously, that’s probably not going to happen, but at the end of the day, you can think like that. Slow starts happen and we just have to build off it as a team. It just builds character. We move on and learn from our mistakes. We’ll find a groove here.”
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