Run your eye down the Vegas forward group from last season and it starts to feel unfair. Jack Eichel, 90 points and a 60 percent on-ice share. Mitch Marner, added in the summer of 2025, 80 points and an identical 60. Mark Stone, when healthy, drove a preposterous 66 percent. Pavel Dorofeyev scored 37 goals before he was traded to the Rangers in June. Tomas Hertl put up 58 points at a 65 percent clip as, essentially, the third-line centre. This was the deepest, most balanced collection of forwards in the league, a group with no obvious weak line and two genuine number-one centres down the middle.
And it might not matter in the spring, because the Golden Knights have a problem in the one place depth cannot fix.
| What | Number | The read |
|---|---|---|
| Eichel plus Marner points | 170 | Two point-per-game drivers on the same roster |
| Forwards above 55 points | 6 | No soft spot in the top nine |
| Adin Hill goals saved above expected | -14.2 | The crease gave much of it back |
| Team 5-on-5 share | 54% | Elite by every measure but one |
The forwards are the easy part
There is little to nitpick up front. Eichel and Marner give Vegas two players who both score at better than a point a game and both tilt the ice by ten points of expected-goals share. Behind them, Ivan Barbashev (61 points) and Hertl anchor a second wave most teams would run as their first. That wave is one player shorter than it was: on June 26 Vegas sent Dorofeyev, its 37-goal scorer, to the Rangers for the No. 26 and No. 92 picks in the 2026 draft and a conditional 2028 first-rounder, a bet that the top of the lineup can carry the scoring he leaves behind. Rasmus Andersson, re-signed below market, gives the blue line a genuine puck-mover. By the run of play, this was a 54 percent team, and it earned that number honestly, with four lines that could control a shift. Even a notch thinner, the forward group is not where the season will be decided.
The number the parade planning ignores
Then you get to the crease, and the picture changes. Adin Hill, the goalie who backstopped a Cup run not long ago, finished the season 14 goals below what an average netminder would have allowed. Akira Schmid, the nominal partner, was a shade below break-even himself. A team that controls play the way Vegas does can absorb ordinary goaltending. It cannot easily absorb goaltending that actively subtracts more than a dozen goals over a season, and it certainly cannot count on that crease to steal the two or three games a playoff series always comes down to.
This is the quiet asymmetry of the roster. Vegas has spent its cap and its trade capital building a forward group with no holes, which means the margin it is chasing, the last few percent that separates a contender from a champion, has to come from the position it has least addressed. You do not out-depth a bad save percentage in a seven-game series, and after the Dorofeyev trade there is slightly less depth to try it with.
Why it still matters
None of this makes the Golden Knights anything less than a legitimate contender. A 54 percent team with this much forward talent starts most nights as the better club, and if Hill rediscovers even league-average form, Vegas is right back in the conversation with the team that beat them in the Final. But that is the whole bet now, and it is worth naming plainly instead of burying it under the highlight reel. The Golden Knights built the best team in hockey from the blue line up. Whether it wins anything rests on the one man they cannot simply add depth around.
Correction, September 7, 2026: An earlier version of this article described Pavel Dorofeyev as a current member of the Vegas forward group, including in the excerpt. Vegas traded Dorofeyev to the New York Rangers on June 26, 2026, for the No. 26 and No. 92 picks in the 2026 draft and a conditional 2028 first-round pick. The article has been updated to describe Dorofeyev's 2025-26 season in the past tense, to note the trade, and to adjust the depth argument accordingly, and the excerpt has been revised. The statistical analysis of the 2025-26 season is unchanged.