Toronto scored three goals in the first 8:37 at T-Mobile Arena on Thursday and lost. Vegas won 4-3 in a shootout, the fifth three-goal comeback win in the franchise’s history.
Jack Roslovic scored 34 seconds in. Easton Cowan added a breakaway goal at 3:20. Nick Paul tipped a Darren Raddysh shot past Adin Hill at 8:37. Nine minutes of hockey, three goals, and a building that had already gone quiet.
Adin Hill Stopped Everything After That
Hill finished with 21 saves and then stopped four more in the shootout. The number does not look dramatic until you account for when those saves happened, which was every minute after his team had been gutted in the opening period.
Vegas coach Ryan Craig framed it as a team effect rather than an individual one. “As our team got better, Hilly got better,” he said. That is generous to the skaters and probably backward. A goalie who gives up a fourth goal in that spot loses the game, and Hill did not.
Mark Stone got Vegas on the board at 17:36 of the first, which mattered more than the score suggested. Going into the room down 3-1 instead of 3-0 is a different conversation.
Eichel’s Penalty Shot Changed It
Brett Howden cut it to 3-2 just 1:12 into the second off a Mitch Marner pass. Then Morgan Rielly tripped Jack Eichel on a breakaway, and Eichel converted the penalty shot at 3:58 to tie it.
Eichel now has points in all five games this season, with three goals and nine assists. Twelve points in five games is an absurd start, and he is doing it while Vegas has already banked a 4-1-0 record in a new 84-game format.
Trevor Connelly ended it in the fifth round of the shootout after Braeden Bowman had also scored. “It was awesome,” Connelly said, which is a perfectly adequate description of winning a game your team had no business being in.
Toronto Has a Pattern Problem
The Maple Leafs are 2-2-1. Easton Cowan put it simply: “We would have liked a better second.”
They would have liked a better 50 minutes. Toronto generated a three-goal lead against a contender on the road and then stopped doing the things that produced it. Marner, now on the other side of that rivalry, described what Vegas did in the middle period: “We’re hunting pucks. We’re getting pucks back.”
One other note from the night. The crowd of 15,977 was the first non-sellout in the Golden Knights’ ten-year history outside of the 2020-21 season. The people who left early missed the best part.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.