Golden Knights and Kings face off in Game 4 on Tuesday night in Los Angeles. Game Recap
LOS ANGELES – The Los Angeles Kings demonstrated Sunday how tough they are. All the Vegas Golden Knights did was prove again how good they are.
Battered by the Kings all game, the Knights absorbed all the physical punishment and then scored three times in the third period to beat Los Angeles 3-2 and move within a game of winning their first ever National Hockey League playoff series.
In 2018, speed beats physicality. At least it does when you combine it with the skill, cohesiveness, lineup depth and self-belief the Knights have engineered in their improbable, impossible inaugural season.
Those 51 wins in the regular campaign were not lucky. Vegas is that good. Now the Knights are 3-0 in the Stanley Cup playoffs, too, and can make the final eight with a win in Game 4 here Tuesday.
“We’re going to be in all different situations throughout the playoffs here if we want to make a run,” veteran James Neal said after scoring the 26th playoff goal of his career during the Knights’ late surge. “We knew they weren’t going to go away, knew the (physical) push they were going to have. We just believe in ourselves, believe in our team and we continue to play the right way.”
If people were expecting a market correction or reality check for the Knights in the playoffs, it isn’t happening against the Kings, who played their best game of the series and still lost.
“I think people have been waiting since Game 1 and it hasn’t happened yet,” Vegas centre Cody Eakin said. “We don’t plan on slowing down.”
With Vegas trailing for the first time in the playoffs, Eakin tied it 1-1 at 6:10 of the third period when, after his first shot was blocked by defenceman Dion Phaneuf, the Knight got a second chance and buried Ryan Carpenter’s pass behind goalie Jonathan Quick.
Neal then spun away from Kings defenceman Oscar Fantenberg and fooled Quick with a quick shot through his pads to make it 2-1 at 14:23. And 21 seconds later, William Karlsson converted Reilly Smith’s centring pass after the Vegas forward beat two Kings to puck on the end boards following a lost faceoff.
Anze Kopitar deflected in Fantenberg’s shot to bring the Kings within a goal with 2:04 remaining. But Los Angeles still fell to 0-3 in this series and 1-7 since the Kings won their second of two Stanley Cups four years ago.
“They were relentless on their forecheck, turning it up ice and playing the way we like to play,” Eakin said. “We did a good job weathering it and continuing to move our feet and in the third period we capitalized at the right time.”
Unable through two games to join ’em, the Kings tried to beat ’em on Sunday.
They tried to slow down the Knights the old-fashioned way. Well, the old-fashioned way in playoff hockey. The Kings hammered the Knights physically every chance they could.
Off-ice officials in this series have showered the scoresheet with hits as if they were throwing rice at newlyweds. Los Angeles coach John Stevens noted after Game 1 (127 official hits in 60 minutes) that if the stats were accurate there’d be nobody left to play Game 2.
On Sunday, the Kings were credited with 28 hits in the first 20 minutes. That may have included dirty looks and bad breath. But what was indisputable was the physical intensity with which the Kings attacked the Knights.
On one indicative sequence, Los Angeles winger Dustin Brown tripped Marc-Andre Fleury as the Vegas goalie tried to get across his crease, then steadied himself by chopping down with his stick on the back of defenceman Nate Schmidt’s leg. Had there been a folding metal chair nearby, as there is in wrestling, Brown would have smashed it over someone’s head when the refs weren’t looking.
In more conventional hits, Jake Muzzin knocked down Karlsson, Adrian Kempe threw to the ice Jon Merrill, and Drew Doughty blasted Smith. All in the first five minutes. But between all those early hits, the game was still in the Kings’ zone more than it was the Knights’ half of the ice.
Quick, who was easily the best King in Las Vegas – sorry fat Elvis – for the series’ first two games, made a backdoor save against Colin Miller and bumped Erik Haula’s shot straight up in the air, finding the puck just in time to keep it from tumbling in behind him.
Ironically, amid all the human missiles the Kings were launching, it was overly-aggressive play by the Knights’ Schmidt that led to Los Angeles’ opening goal at 13:14.
The Vegas defenceman drifted behind the net to try to land a check on Brown, who was already engaged with Brayden McNabb, Schmidt’s partner. When the puck squirted to Kopitar, there was no defenceman in front to cover Alex Iafallo, who tucked the puck under the bar for a 1-0 lead that had to be confirmed by a video review.
The official scorer’s pen must have run out of ink in the second period because the Kings were credited with only nine hits, which is akin to pacifism. But L.A. maintained its lead until the Eakin line turned the game on one superb, third-period shift.
“It was for sure the toughest one,” Karlsson said. “They came in hard, they were physical.”
And still the Knights won. That should tell you something.
Photo: Chris Carlson (AP Photo)
Game 3 was going to be nasty, and the Golden Knights knew it. With the Kings down 2-0 and the series leaving Vegas, where the Knights have been so good at home (the “Vegas Flu” is real, but so is their home-crowd advantage), Los Angeles was going to come out pesty and physical, finishing their checks, talking a ton of shit, and just being all-around infuriating. All with the express intention of irritating the playoff-inexperienced Golden Knights enough to get them off their game. It worked. For two periods.
Vegas came back with three goals in the third to win 3-2 and is a game away from a sweep, but it looked iffy there for a while. The Kings, true to plan (and with Drew Doughty back in the lineup after his suspension), played hard and rough.
“We knew what they were going to come out and do,” James Neal said. “They were hard on us. They were physical, a heavy team that you’d expect. Kind of weathered the storm a bit at the start.”
Kyle Clifford and William Carrier dropped the gloves, a rarity for the postseason, though the two were separated by officials before throwing punches. Erik Haula, incensed over being checked to the ice by Anze Kopitar, butt-ended Kopitar in the face:
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Doughty took at run at Jonathan Marchessault, who retaliated and got called for high-sticking—to which Doughty applauded:
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All the while, the Kings were sitting on an early lead and were going wholly unthreatened. Vegas’s game had no flow. But they did have patience.
“We’re not going to get the calls if we’re kind of retaliating, so the best way to do it is push through it, skate through it, skate through their checks, skate through the adversity, and we did a good job of that in the third,” Cody Eakin said.
This was certainly not his primary intention when GM George McPhee took a handful of veterans in the expansion draft, but having older, experienced players matters very much in the playoffs, when losing your temper can mean losing the game. “A lot of guys on our team have been in those situations before,” Neal noted, “and won in them before.”
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Vegas iced just five players in this game that were born in the 1980s, but those veterans—Neal, David Perron, Marc-Andre Fleury, Deryk Engelland, and Pierre-Edouard Bellemare—have relatively extensive playoff experience, and know how to keep their heads when opponents are trying to rattle them. Crucially, Vegas’s locker-room leaders were able to calm their younger teammates and talk them into going back to what had worked so well in the first two games of this series.
“No one started panicking,” Bellemare said. “There are three or four guys that talk in between the periods and they were saying ‘boys we’re fine.’ Coach came in and told us ‘I hope you guys knew they were going to come hard,” and we knew that. We are in their building and we knew they’d come hard but it’s tough to do 60 minutes of that.”
The rope-a-dope seemed to work. Cody Eakin tied things up early in the period, and then, with 5:37 remaining, Neal, providing so much more than just advice, put the Golden Knights on top.
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Just 21 seconds later, William Karlsson buried a great pass from Reilly Smith following a faceoff to seal things up.
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That’s three goals in an 8:34 stretch, and, notably, Vegas did not take a third-period penalty until they had seized a two-goal lead. Kopitar got one back with 2:04 remaining, but Fleury held on for the win.
Game 4 is Tuesday night, and Vegas will be looking to close out the sweep. And while this feels weird to say about an expansion team, I’m not sure there’s anything the desparate Kings can throw at the Golden Knights that they haven’t seen before.
We’re far beyond the point of debating if the Vegas Golden Knights are “for real,” but the expansion team’s first-year accomplishments keep stacking up to a staggering degree.
The 2018 Stanley Cup Playoffs haven’t ruined the party. In Game 1, the Golden Knights grabbed their first-ever goal, win, and shutout in beating the Los Angeles Kings 1-0. Game 2 brought great drama, as even though Jonathan Quick played an incredible game, Vegas ultimately broke through for the 2-1 win in the waning minutes of double overtime. The Golden Knights leveraged their home-ice advantage during those first two games, but it turns out that a change of venue couldn’t stop them.
This time around, Marc-Andre Fleury was the goalie who was stealing the show, stopping 37 out of 39 shots on goal as the Golden Knights pushed the Kings to the brink of elimination with a 3-2 in.
Yes, that’s right, the VGK are now up 3-0 in this series. In their first crack at a playoff series, they’re already getting their first opportunity to complete a sweep in the postseason.
[NBC’s Stanley Cup Playoff Hub]
At this point, it’s insufficient to call the Golden Knights “quick learners.” Instead, their prodigies on the Mozartian scale; maybe their mascot should be Doogie Howser?
Speaking of quick, that’s how this game turned, echoing the Penguins running away with their contest and the Wild doing the same today.
The Kings carried a 1-0 lead into the third period, but Cody Eakin buried a great David Perron pass to complete a busy sequence, tying things up 6:10 in. The dizzying turn of events happened later, as James Neal followed up his wonderful assist on the overtime game-winner in Game 2 to a sneaky goal to put Vegas up 2-1 with 5:37 left in the third:
Neal’s goal is the rare one Quick would want back, although maybe that’s only relative to this series, as it was a pretty nifty move and release. Just 21 seconds later, the Golden Knights stunned the Kings as Reilly Smith made an outstanding play to set up William Karlsson for what would end up being the game-winner.
Anze Kopitar gave the Kings a chance with a wonderful showing of hand-eye coordination for his first goal of the series with a little more than two minutes remaining in regulation, yet it wasn’t enough to nullify that two-goal burst.
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The Kings enjoyed a far better showing in Game 3 than in Game 2, demonstrating the difference that Drew Doughty and Jake Muzzin can make in a variety of situations. Of course, the Golden Knights’ big addition mattered as well, as Perron generated that sweet assist on the 1-1 Eakin goal.
Vegas isn’t just sticking with the Kings from a finesse standpoint, either. This has been a physical, sometimes grinding series, and the Golden Knights continue to match L.A. halfway. Between the heated exchanges and the controversial suspension, it’s clear that they’ve had Doughty’s attention the entire way.
Doughty with the rare troll clap in Marchessault’s face pic.twitter.com/kwNi6PuTJI — Pete Blackburn (@PeteBlackburn) April 16, 2018
Now, the next and biggest challenge so far: eliminating a team on the brink of their season ending.
So far, the Golden Knights have been exemplary in passing these tests, although the Kings have provide very little breathing room on the scoreboard. Vegas would be foolish to rest on its laurels, either, as they merely need to ask the San Jose Sharks how dangerous this Kings animal can get when it’s backed into a corner.
Game 4 airs on NBCSN on Tuesday, with puck drop slated for 10:30 p.m. ET.
James O’Brien is a writer for Pro Hockey Talk on NBC Sports. Drop him a line at phtblog@nbcsports.com or follow him on Twitter @cyclelikesedins.
