A frustrated Nathan MacKinnon loses his cool after losing Game 1

The Vegas Golden Knights broke the ice with a 4-2 win over the Colorado Avalanche in Game 1 of the Western Conference Final.

The Golden Knights scored the game's first three goals, despite some pretty even play and managed to hold off the Avs as they pushed hard in the final frame. Golden Knights goaltender Carter Hart made 36 saves in perhaps his best showing of the post-season so far.

“It's huge. I mean, to come out like we did, I thought we came out really good in the first period,” Hart said after the game. “We know they're a good team. We know they got a lot of skill on their team, and we respect that. But you can't respect them too much, and I thought we did a good job of defending and limiting their time and space. And I thought we blocked a lot of shots tonight, got in a lot of lanes, and tied up some sticks.”

Golden Knights head coach John Tortorella was proud of his team's resolve during a tightly played game.

“To come into this building against that team in this type of situation where they try to kind of blitz you, I thought our first period was good,” Vegas coach John Tortorella said. “It was a good road period for us. Listen, we had some major inconsistencies. We didn’t play a flawless game by any means. We got some timely goals, got some great saves at key times. We have work to do. Nice to get the first one under your belt and get a win, but we have plenty of work to do when we’re playing against that team.”

On the Avs' side, there was some clear frustration from head coach Jared Bednar and his team.

“You’ve got to find the hunger earlier in the game," Bednar told reporters after the game. "We all know the importance of these games and every game, especially next game now with it being our second home game down one. It shouldn’t be hard to sort of drive the urgency, and there’s a few things that are building blocks of our team and our team identity that I think we can do more consistently to help us earlier in the game.”

Superstar Nathan MacKinnon was pretty gruff in his media availability after the game, calling out his team's lack of execution. When pressed further, a clearly frustrated MacKinnon brushed off reporters saying, "I've just said execution like 5 times."

What's interesting to me is that this is really the first sign of adversity that we've seen from the Avs this post-season and it appears that they're having a hard time handling it.

To be fair, this was just moments after the team's first loss to put them down in a series all post-season, so I'll allow them some grace. You have to imagine though that if they go down 2-0 in this series, then frustrations are going to ramp up even more. All eyes will be on the Avs' leadership group in Game 2... for now we wait to see if that group includes superstar defenseman Cale Makar, who did not play Game 1 due to an undisclosed injury.