Golden Knights' Bottom Six Gets Sharper Roles Under Ryan Craig

(Photo Credit: NHL.com/goldenknights)

Ryan Craig's first season as Golden Knights head coach is starting to show its shape, and the most revealing trend so far is how he's assigning his forward lines. Vegas used to run a fairly even deployment, with all four forward units spending time in both zones. Craig's version is much more compartmentalized. Each line is getting a clearer job, and that changes how every forward in the bottom six should be judged.

The zone-start numbers draw the lines

Through 17 games, the offensive zone start percentages for Vegas forwards tell a blunt story. Here's the list, from highest to lowest:

• Olofsson, 93.3%
• Hertl, 84.2%
• Connelly, 79.7%
• Stone, 68.4%
• Lavoie, 64.7%
• Eichel, 62.0%
• Marner, 61.9%
• Barbashev, 58.3%
• Bowman, 53.3%
• Howden, 50.0%
• Karlsson, 38.4%
• Gatcomb, 34.0%
• Holtz, 28.6%
• Dowd, 23.7%

Craig is clearly using his third line to start in the offensive zone and his fourth line to start in the defensive zone. Hertl and Connelly are averaging fewer than three defensive zone starts per game, while Gatcomb and Dowd are right around two offensive zone starts per game. Those are very lopsided workloads, and they're the first thing I'd look at when someone asks what this system is actually doing.

Sharper than last season and the 2023 Cup run

Compare this with last regular season and the gap gets more obvious. Only Dorofeyev was above 70%. The only player with more than 20 games who finished under 30% was Colton Sissons.

The 2023 playoff run is an even better reference point, since it was a Cup-winning team using a more balanced template. Nobody was above 80%, and nobody was below 30%. Eight of the 11 regulars sat between 40% and 70%. Craig's version pushes the extremes much further apart, and that's a deliberate departure from what worked in that championship postseason.

What the even minutes hide

Those zone-start splits feed directly into who scores. At 5-on-5, Dowd, Gatcomb and Bowman have each been on the ice for three Golden Knights goals. Connelly and Hertl, the third-line pairing the numbers point to, have been on for nine. That's a three-to-one gap in goals for, and it follows straight from where each group starts its shifts.

The ice-time gap is much smaller than the production gap, which is the important part. Gatcomb and Dowd have each played around 180 minutes at 5-on-5. The third-line forwards are just over 190 minutes apiece. Ice time isn't what separates these groups. Where the shifts start is.

The fourth line has generated almost nothing offensively all season, and that's by design. Craig has asked those players to carry most of the defensive load for the bottom six. They're only down four goals across roughly 10 minutes a game, which is the kind of number a coach who's asking for defensive work will take.

Why the hierarchy changes the expectations

Once roles harden, the evaluation has to change with them. If the third line gets four times as many offensive-zone opportunities as the fourth, it's fair to expect something close to four times the goals. Judging a fourth-liner on offense misses the point of the assignment, and judging a third-liner on defense misses the point of theirs.

Here's the thing: zone starts are an input, not an output. A line can own the offensive zone and still struggle to finish, and a checking unit can do its job without the scoresheet noticing. That's why the next few weeks matter. Watch whether the third line's opportunity advantage converts into goals at a rate that matches the zone-start gap, and whether the fourth line keeps its goal deficit tight in its limited minutes.

Craig has built a hierarchy that's more extreme than anything Vegas has used before. The coaching decision is made. The payoff now depends on the players converting the chances they're being given.