Vegas Golden Knights center Mattias Janmark (26) falls as he skates against Toronto Maple Leafs center John Tavares (91) in overtime of an NHL hockey game at T-Mobile Arena Tuesday, Jan. 11, 2022. Vegas Golden Knights defenseman Alex Pietrangelo (7) is at right.
Tuesday, Jan. 11, 2022 | 11:05 p.m.
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The Golden Knights' Alex Pietrangelo has played parts of 14 NHL seasons, and on Tuesday night, a week shy of his 32nd birthday, he played more hockey than he ever has in the regular season.
Pietrangelo logged an eye-popping 32:55 against Toronto, more than half the 65-minute minute game. He also scored the game-tying goal to send the action to overtime and help earn Vegas one standing point in an eventual 4-3 shootout loss to the Maple Leafs at T-Mobile Arena.
On a night where the Golden Knights were down three regular defensemen, they needed their best at the position to step up, and he did in a major way.
“Not too (sore) right now,” Pietrangelo said. “I’m sure tomorrow I’ll pick up my kids and feel something in the back of the hamstrings.”
Pietrangelo’s ice time surpassed his previous high in ice time by one second — he skated for 32:54 on Nov. 21, 2015, with the St. Louis Blues. He’d only passed half an hour once in two seasons in Vegas, and had not surpassed 31 minutes in a Golden Knights jersey in the regular season.
He did it because he had to.
The Golden Knights have missed Alec Martinez for much of the season after he took a skate to the face in November, and Nicolas Hague hasn’t played in the new year with a wrist injury. Then Shea Theodore was unavailable after entering league COVID-19 protocols.
That left Vegas with three of its ideal starting six in Pietrangelo, Brayden McNabb and Zach Whitecloud, its season-opening seventh defenseman in Dylan Coghlan, and two players in Ben Hutton and Daniil Miromanov who weren’t with the team at the start of the season.
Vegas leaned on McNabb (22:28 of ice time) and Whitecloud (18:36), but not in the way they did Pietrangelo. Case in point — there were six shifts by defensemen in overtime. Pietrangelo took half of them.
“He knew we needed that,” coach Pete DeBoer said. “He knew we were going to need a big game out of him tonight, and he was a monster tonight. I thought he was maybe the best player on the ice.”
It wasn’t just that Pietrangelo played a lot either, he was a force. He registered eight shot attempts (six on goal), four takeaways and two blocked shots. He salvaged a stagnant 5-on-3 power play with a wrister to tie the game, a power-play unit by the way on which he spent a team-high 7:24.
He also killed off 2:43 worth of penalties, which, you guessed it, was a team-high.
“We need to people to step up throughout the whole season,” goalie Robin Lehner said. “(Pietrangelo’s) been one of our best players, he’s obviously one of the best defensemen in the world. He played really good tonight and it’s fun to see.”
The Golden Knights were disappointed they didn’t come away with two points, but seemed proud of the effort to get one. They outshot the Maple Leafs 34-18 and controlled large stretches of the game, particularly in the first half of the second period.
Yet even in that period it was Toronto that scored, netting two to grab a 3-1 lead going to the third. For a team that entered the night 17-1-1 when leading after two periods, scoring twice was bound to be an uphill battle.
But that’s just what Vegas did. William Karlsson scored 1:34 into the third to trim the deficit to one, then Pietrangelo wristed home his eighth of the season with 8:12 to go to tie things up.
The game will go into the standing page under the “OTL” column and the fourth loss in the last five for the Golden Knights, but it wasn’t as gutting as a typical loss.
“It sucks,” Lehner said. “You always want two points but I’m very happy we battled back. Huge point for us, but that happens in shootouts sometimes.”
The Golden Knights now enjoy a five-day break because of postponements to their originally scheduled games on Friday and Saturday. They only have two practices on the schedule between now and Monday’s game against Pittsburgh, meaning there is plenty of time to recharge.
“You’ve got to take care of your body and take a couple of days and relax and enjoy yourself, and for me it’s a good mental break,” Pietrangelo said. “For me it’s going to be nice to kind of shut the brain off and be a dad and just kind of relax mentally here for four, five days and kind of reset the brain and get ready for next week.”
