The Vegas Golden Knights will kick off their Stanley Cup Playoffs against the Chicago Blackhawks tonight in Game 1.
The wait is over, after months and months of staying at home through a pandemic the Stanley Cup Playoffs are here. The Vegas Golden Knights will kick off their Stanley Cup Playoffs run when they face off against the Chicago Blackhawks in Game 1.
Earlier this week, head coach Pete Deboer did confirm that Max Pacioretty who missed all three of Vegas round-robin games due to an undisclosed injury is good to go for game one. He will be another key piece to a team that is loaded with offense. We should find out line ups and starting netminders later today but I would expect Marc Andre Fleury to get the start.
Vegas has qualified for the playoffs in every season it’s played since the team started playing back in 2017-18. They made it all the way to the Stanley Cup final in their first season shattering every record as an expansion team. The next year they were up 3-1 in their first-round series vs the San Jose Sharks and 4-1 in game 7 before the Sharks stormed back in a miraculous fashion to win game 7 in overtime 5-4.
Vegas and Chicago met three times during the regular season and Vegas won two of those meetings. The Knights finished the round-robin with a perfect record of 3-0 and finished as the number one seed for the first time in their short team history.
The Chicago Blackhawks entered the play-in series as the number 12 seed but shocked the league when they upset the Edmonton Oilers.
The players to watch for Chicago are of course Jonathan Toews, Patrick Kane, Dominik Kubalik, and of Corey Crawford in net. This should be a very high scoring series and prove to be a very exciting one. The game can be seen starting at 10:30 pm eastern, 7:30 pm pacific time on Sportsnet in Canada, NBCSN, ATTSN-RM, and NBCSCH.