After clinching home ice advantage for the first round of the Stanley Cup playoffs with a shootout loss to the Colorado Avalanche on Tuesday, the Vegas Golden Knights will try to take another step toward winning their fifth division title in eight years when they host the Seattle Kraken on Thursday in Las Vegas.
Vegas (47-22-9, 103 points) leads the Pacific Division by six points over the second-place Los Angeles Kings (44-24-9, 97 points). The Golden Knights have four games and a possible eight points remaining while the Kings have five games left. Vegas also holds a big 43-39 edge in the regulation wins tiebreaker.
The Golden Knights garnered five of a possible six points on a three-game road trip that included a pair of 3-2 victories at Calgary and Vancouver before finishing it with a 3-2 shootout loss to the Avalanche on Tuesday in Denver. The one point guaranteed Vegas home ice for their first-round playoff series, likely against either St. Louis or Minnesota.
“To be able to get a point, get right down to the wire, there’s certainly some positives there,” Golden Knights coach Bruce Cassidy said. “Every point matters, especially this time of year.”
Perhaps more impressive is that Vegas managed to do it without star center Jack Eichel, held out with an upper-body injury, and defensemen Alex Pietrangelo and Nicolas Hague, who both didn’t play because of illness.
“We’ll see where he’s at when we get back home,” Cassidy said of Eichel, who leads the team with 93 points (27 goals, 66 assists) but had failed to score a point in four consecutive games. “A couple other guys were sick, but they played, almost because they had to. Little (bug) going through the room a little bit.”
Seattle, already eliminated from the playoffs, will be finishing a five-game road trip that started impressively with three wins, including a 2-1 victory at Los Angeles on Monday, but that streak came to a crashing end Tuesday with an ugly 7-1 loss to the Utah Hockey Club in Salt Lake City.
Utah set a franchise-record with the seven goals, all of which occurred in the first two periods en route to a 7-0 lead. Jared McCann scored a power-play goal early in the third period to break the shutout.
“That’s not the type of hockey we’ve been playing of late,” Seattle coach Dan Bylsma said. “It was a challenge, with a back-to-back, something we know we have to get better at. … It’s disappointing.”
The Kraken (34-39-6, 74 points) were whistled for six penalties in the first 40 minutes resulting in three Utah power-play goals.
“You can’t give a team like that that many chances in power play, they’re going to make you pay,” McCann said. “We just didn’t have it tonight, and we left our goalie out to dry.”
Joey Daccord, who made 29 saves and was brilliant a night earlier in helping hand the Kings just their fifth regulation home loss of the season, departed after stopping only 22 of 29 shots in the first two periods. Victor Ostman, who began the season with East Coast Hockey League affiliate Kansas City, made his NHL debut in the third period and stopped all 12 shots, five of which were rated high-danger chances by Natural Hat Trick.
“He got challenged,” Bylsma said. “He made three or four really good saves and looked really solid in that first NHL experience. It was a good one for him.”
This will be the rubber game of the three contests between the two teams. The Kraken, on an overtime goal by McCann, won the first one, 4-3, in Seattle on Nov. 8 while the Golden Knights, behind a goal and two assists from Mark Stone, won the second one, 6-2, in Las Vegas on Dec. 21.
–Field Level Media
