Golden Knights’ Defining Moments: The overtime comeback versus the Blues

By Justin Emerson

Saturday, April 11, 2020 | 2 a.m.

The Golden Knights were riding high to start the second half of the season.

They dropped the first game after the Christmas break but then rattled off three wins in a row to start a seven-game homestand including a first-place battle with Arizona and a high-octane clash against Philadelphia.

Then the St. Louis Blues came to town.

The defending Stanley Cup champions hadn’t shown any sort of hangover through that point of the season. What followed was one of the most entertaining Golden Knights game of the season.

Over the next couple weeks, the Las Vegas Sun will look back at pivotal moments throughout the season. The series will cover everything from the obvious turning points to more obscure ones that went by without much fanfare at the time but turned out to be important.

Today we look at the overtime comeback against the Stanley Cup champions.

Where the Golden Knights were

By virtue of the aforementioned win streak, Vegas sat atop the Pacific Division. It may have already been said a few times before — notably after the last-second win in Nashville — but many were starting to think the Golden Knights were finally turning the corner.

The Jan. 4 meeting at T-Mobile Arena was the second of three dates with the Blues on the season. Vegas lost 4-2 in St. Louis a month earlier, the franchise’s seventh all-time meeting and, ultimately, the seventh straight time the Golden Knights failed to beat the Blues in regulation.

The Golden Knights again struggled in the eighth game, going down 3-0 in the first period. St. Louis maintained the same lead past the midway point of the second period.

Vegas was 0-13-1 to that point in the season when it fell down by two goals at any point of the game. Against the champions, no one could have been blamed for changing the channel.

But the Blues didn’t coast to a win as expected.

What happened

Ryan Reaves got the Golden Knights on the board in the second period, and Paul Stastny scored near the end of the frame to trim the Blues’ lead to 3-2. Nicolas Roy tied it early in the third, and Reilly Smith gave the Golden Knights a 4-3 lead at the 9:50 mark.

It would be notable if the Golden Knights held on to win by that score. Instead, former Golden Knight David Perron tied the game again three minutes later to force overtime.

Getting to overtime wasn’t enough for the Golden Knights; one point in the standings would have been a disappointment for the amount of effort they put into their comeback. Chandler Stephenson made sure to send the crowd home happy, scoring on a breakaway 3:01 into the extra frame for a thrilling win.

How it was received

Half of the respondents in a Twitter poll I posted that night judged the win as the biggest of the season. In the night's game story, I hailed it as “a win a team can look back on after a postseason run and point to as a moment that catapulted them to the upper echelon of teams in the league.”

Goalie Marc-Andre Fleury summed it up succinctly. “Oh God, it feels good, man,” he said.

As of the NHL season’s pause, it was one of two times this season the Golden Knights had come back from down two goals to win, with the other coming a month later, also against the Blues.

How much it mattered looking back

If the Nashville game wasn’t the signature win, it had to have been this one, right? Well, about that …

If this season taught us anything, it was to not put too much stock into one game. The Nashville victory was a good one but wasn’t the turning point of the season. Similarly, the Blues win in January was terrific but what happened next shattered any conceptions that it was anything more than two points in the standings.

The Golden Knights lost their next four games and fired coach Gerard Gallant.

So, that makes it hard draw any conclusions.

The Blues win was the first of four straight home games where the Golden Knights fell behind 3-0 and the only one Vegas ended up winning. The Golden Knights then started an eight-game road trip by falling to the lowly Sabres in Buffalo.

The next morning, Gallant was out and Pete DeBoer was in.

The Blues win was a great comeback, but there was no afterglow. Consider it a good win and a fine memory for anyone who stuck through the 3-0 deficit.

But it was 10 days before the biggest news of the season, the Gallant-DeBoer fire-hire, so it didn’t matter much at all in the end.