Vegas was all about quick strike, heavy pressure and never giving up. Their defense was pretty active and mobile and they got shelled in 5 games.
Vegas has a mobile defense and structure in place, they went five games. We have a very good two way defense that played terrible - as a team - and got beat in 7 (Albeit it could've been 5 if we swapped Vasy for anybody else). The only way to combat that is to play a heavy style that gets their defenseman turning. We made Orpik look like Hedman most nights. Guy has footspeed like Jason Garrison and still never got walked or even had it rough with a team as fast as ours. Like Evgeny "I don't play defense myself" Kuznetsov said, our forecheck doesn't work. It didnt. They basically, or should I say Holtby, waited for the inevitable easy dump 1 foot off the ice or on the ice, to then make 1 pass and successfully break out. We had very little success sustaining pressure for lengths of time and even when we did, we passed ourselves into submission. That's not a defenseman issue moving their feet issue. We didn't score for damn near three full games, that's not fixed with getting Marc Andre Bergeron type defenseman.
This team didn't need a Niskanen, Maata, etc type guy. We got beat in my opinion, in 18 out of 21 periods, because we were smaller (and pur bigger guys played even smaller) and failed to expose their weaknesses. Kempny was selling pucks to opposing players, Orpik is like a freight train that goes 2MPH, Orlov is good but made a LOT of mistakes this postseason, etc. We made their defensive group look like Team Canada at times. If your defense is bad, you can single out where you need help. If your offense is bad, you can single out where you need help. Other than adding some size to help us going forward, there really wasn't a mismatch in skill. In heart, yes. But systematically we didn't make it hard on them. Neither did Vegas after game 2 tbh.
Adding size up front and the removal of Bowness should help. Anything less than a cup and Cooper should be gone. I like his philosophy of getting close to players and he certainly is a good coach, but I'm not sure he has what it takes at the moment to find out how to get over the hump.