James Neal opens his mouth and scrunches his face to help raise his scabbed upper lip. All that effort from the Vegas Golden Knights winger results in a view of an absolutely battered gum that once had at least four front teeth and is now home to a gap you could fit half a hockey puck through. “Everything’s sensitive,” Neal says, standing rink-side after an off-day skate in Toronto. With those teeth missing up top, all aggressively punched out by a stick to the face in late October, Neal “can’t do anything,” he says. Eating is tough, and don’t bother asking him to whistle because he doesn’t think that’s funny and “it hurts too much.” The wounds reopened during a game a couple days ago and blood poured from Neal’s mouth. Says the Golden Knights leading goal-scorer, now dressed in sneakers, knee-high socks, shorts and a Vegas hoodie: “Nothing’s good right now.”

Well, nothing inside Neal’s mouth, at least. This season is a whole other story: “Everything’s gone better than you’d expect,” Neal says, and that’s an understatement. Nobody predicted any of this for the Golden Knights. Six days after Las Vegas was the site of the worst mass shooting in modern American history, the NHL’s 31st franchise played its first-ever game, and the team not only became a rallying point for a grieving city but, to everyone’s surprise, they also started winning, which is very un-expansion-like. Vegas matched a 100-year-old NHL record for the quickest team to nine wins in an inaugural season — getting there in just 13 games — and the Golden Knights were the best in the NHL for part of October. Only five teams have more than Vegas’s 21 points right now, and that’s despite a tough stretch of late with their first-, second- and third-string goalies injured — including the face of the franchise in Marc-Andre Fleury.