The best and probably most important thing you can say about Jack Eichel's debut with the Vegas Golden Knights was that he got through it Tuesday night.
From a physical standpoint, the former Sabres captain was able to take a regular shift as his new team's No. 1 center and withstood the normal bumps in the game without any apparent issues from his surgically repaired neck.
But in what rates as no surprise after nearly 11 months off the ice, Eichel was rusty and not remotely his normal dangerous self in the offensive zone. He fumbled the puck a couple times, failed to corral passes he would normally receive with ease and misfired on a couple passes that are usually routine. He even took a pair of penalties.
It seems likely that the former Buffalo Sabres No. 1 draft will be back in the Vegas Golden Knights' lineup by the time they come to KeyBank Center to meet the Sabres on March 10.
The hype surrounding Game One of the Eichel era in Sin City ended with a thud as Vegas suffered a 2-0 loss to the Colorado Avalanche in T-Mobile Arena, enduring back-to-back shutout defeats for the first time in the five-year history of the franchise.
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The national TV audience only saw Eichel's opening faceoff with Vegas on TNT on a split screen and had to watch Eichel's first shift on TruTV because the intense Florida-Carolina game that preceded it went to overtime. The Panthers won it, 3-2, on an Aaron Ekblad goal after 16 seconds.
That game got to OT when the Panthers tied it on a goal with 48.3 seconds left by -- you guessed it -- longtime Eichel friend and ex-Sabres teammate Sam Reinhart.
Yes, sometimes the Hockey Gods work in strange ways.
Eichel was in the starting lineup and took the opening faceoff against Colorado star Nathan MacKinnon after a brief chat between the two prior to the puck being dropped where Eichel revealed MacKinnon was saying "it was good to see me back out here." Eichel took a bump on his first shift in the corner and was jostling with Avs defenseman Cale Makar on his second shift, mostly answering the early physical questions.
For the game, Eichel played 22 shifts totaling 17 minutes, 24 seconds. He had one shot on goal and three attempts, went 8 of 11 on faceoffs and had a minus-1 rating in the game. He didn't have anything close to a good scoring chance.
"There was a lot of energy in the building and the first period you're building a lot of adrenaline. I played pretty well then," Eichel said on a postgame video call. "You don't want to take two penalties and be on the ice [for a goal against], but there's some stuff to build on. They're a really good team, and you get matched up against a pretty good line for part of the game.
"First game in 11 months, it's good to just get back doing it. Honestly, I was having a pretty fun time out there. There's some stuff to build on. It's a process. I know it's going to get better. I didn't expect it to be perfect."
"What we have here is a tale of two homes. While the perpetually rebuilding Sabres are trying to forge one, Jack Eichel is finally going to get a chance to play in his new one," writes Mike Harrington.
"I thought he worked hard," said Vegas coach Peter DeBoer. "Eleven months off, jumping in in the middle of the season against arguably the best team in the league, it's a big ask. I thought he did a good job. We saw flashes of what he's going to be able to do for us. He made some plays to people, did a lot of good things. It's a great first step."
Eichel centered Max Pacioretty and Evgenii Dadonov on Vegas' first line and spent the night matched up against MacKinnon's top line for the Avalanche.
"That's what he's here's for. There's no sense easing him in and he's not a guy who wants to be eased in," DeBoer said of Eichel. "He wants to get out here and play. Out here in this conference, you've got to get used to that. MacKinnon, (Edmonton's Connor) McDavid, (Los Angeles' Anze) Kopitar and on and on."
Third-period goals by MacKinnon's linemates, Gabriel Landeskog and Mikko Rantanen, gave the Avs all the offense they would need in support of Darcy Kuemper's 29-save shutout. Eichel's line was on the ice for Landeskog's goal at 41 seconds of the third. Rantanen put the game away on a power play at 15:45.
The loss dropped Vegas (28-18-3) three points behind Calgary in the Pacific Division standing as the Flames beat Anaheim, 6-2, for their eighth straight win.
The Calgary-Vegas dynamic is a significant one if you're thinking ahead to the postseason, because the Golden Knights are 0-7 in their history in Calgary's Saddledome and just absorbed a 6-0 pasting there in their previous game last Thursday.
Colorado, meanwhile, improved to 35-9-4 and is first overall with 74 points. The Avs -- who are in Buffalo for a matinee against the Sabres on Saturday at 1 p.m. -- had a 19-game point streak snapped Monday in a 4-1 loss to Dallas that ended a 17-0-2 run.
The Golden Knights played without starting goaltender Robin Lehner, Eichel's teammate in Buffalo. He has an upper-body injury but DeBoer said prior to the game Lehner should return "sooner rather than later." Laurent Brossoit made 23 saves in Lehner's place.
The Sabres are rotating rather than sitting one player because Granato doesn’t want anyone sitting for too long, particularly the young defensemen on the roster, and the idea is that a breather will only help them perform better when on the ice.
The debut now behind him, Eichel can start working through the normal grind of an NHL schedule. Vegas' next game is Friday at home against Los Angeles, and Eichel has four Buffalo teammate reunions coming up: March 3 at home against Boston and Linus Ullmark, March 8 at Philadelphia (Rasmus Ristolainen) and March 17 at home against Florida, whose roster includes Reinhart and Brandon Montour.
The big one, of course, is March 10 in KeyBank Center when Eichel returns to meet a Sabres team he might not recognize much with the number of roster changes in Buffalo since he last played a game for the Blue and Gold on March 7, 2021, on Long Island.
"As the game went on, there's no way to emulate game pace and game conditioning and getting bumped," Eichel said. "The timing is going to take a few games for me to get it back. But I'm pretty happy with some things that went on out there."
