Golden Knights felt effects of Stanley Cup hangover this season

When the music stopped and all the partygoers finally went home after celebrating a historic first season, the Golden Knights were left with a yard full of beer cans and rolls of toilet paper hanging from the trees.

It was a rager, to be sure. But it took a while to recover.

Once they did, injuries, a suspension, a brutal road schedule and 30 angry franchises looking for revenge against the expansion team that was three victories away from hoisting the Stanley Cup … it all conspired against the Knights to begin their second season.

The result was a head-pounding hangover that lasted well into November.

“It’s an adjustment when you come back from going to the finals,” general manager George McPhee said. “It doesn’t matter who you are. If you’re in the finals, early in the season everybody plays you hard because you’re a measuring stick.”

Unlike their inaugural season, which opened with eight wins in their first nine games, the Knights stumbled out of the gate for their encore.

Defenseman Nate Schmidt was suspended for the first 20 games after testing positive for a performance-enhancing substance.

Winger Alex Tuch missed the first eight games because of a lower-body injury.

Center Paul Stastny, who signed as a free agent in the offseason, was sidelined Oct. 8 with a right knee injury and missed 30 games.

Forward Erik Haula’s regular season ended Nov. 6 when he was stretchered off the ice in Toronto and later underwent surgery on his right knee.

Newcomer Max Pacioretty missed a handful of games with an upper-body injury, which further hampered a struggling offense.

Coach Gerard Gallant often compared the Knights’ 9-11-1 start to “pushing uphill.”

“Beginning of the year, if you look back to then, you can look back to the finals,” defenseman and alternate captain Deryk Engelland said. “We kind of played not our game defensively. You’ve got (Marc-Andre Fleury) back there in net, and we were giving up a lot of just tap-in goals that I felt we did in the finals as well. And that wasn’t our game.”

The schedule didn’t do the Knights many favors, as the opening five-game road trip featured a back-to-back against the most recent Stanley Cup champions (Washington and Pittsburgh). There was also a rugged four-game swing through eastern Canada and Boston in November.

More significantly, the “Vegas Flu” no longer afflicted the league the way it did in the Knights’ first season.

“Everyone knows what you just came off of, and everyone knows where you just were,” Schmidt said. “They want to say, ‘Last year was a fluke for you. We’re going to come in and beat you. We’re not going to go out till 5.’ I’m not saying anyone did that, but that probably is out the window.”

Schmidt’s return from suspension Nov. 18 gave the Knights a much-needed lift, and the Knights ended the month on a five-game win streak.

By December, they were finally able to clear the cobwebs from the short summer.

“I’m not too sure what put us in that hole, but I knew that we talked about it as a group and we were going to have to dig ourselves out,” defenseman Shea Theodore said. “When you face adversity like that, the guys in the room, that’s what’s going to have to change and we needed some guys to step up in a lot of ways, and I thought we got that.”

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Contact David Schoen at dschoen@reviewjournal.com or 702-387-5203. Follow @DavidSchoenLVRJ on Twitter.