On The Strip, St Louis’ Pavel Buchnevich took a pass below the right circle, and skated to the Vegas Golden Knights’, lifted a shot into the near corner to score with 38 seconds gone in extra time to give the Blues a 2-1 win on Monday night.
Robert Thomas set up the winner off a pass from the high slot.
“He made a good move, got the goalie off his post, and he was able to kind of slide it in on that short side,” Thomas said. “So a big goal and a big win for us.”
Jordan Binnington made 33 saves in the win.
“It’s a fun atmosphere to play in. I enjoy it. You definitely feel like you better show when you play here and going against a team like that,” Binnington said. “They’re a competitive group and they play the right way and play hard, so I think we did a good job stepping up tonight and getting the win.”
St. Louis moved to 13-10-1.
Alexey Toropchenko scored at 19:39 of the first stanza to stake the Blues to a 1-0 lead.
“We feel real good when we score first us, that’s for sure,” Blues coach Craig Berube said. “We haven’t done a great job when we haven’t scored first so far this year, and that’s something we got to improve upon and correct. But when we have the lead, we play confident and we keep coming.”
Vegas dropped to 16-5-5.
The lead held until the back half of the third period when Jack Eichel connected off the power play at 12:58 to tie the game, 1-1, and force the extra session.
“We had a lot of good looks, some Grade As that [Binnington] made stops on. I thought we defended pretty well and didn’t give up a lot,” Golden Knights coach Bruce Cassidy said. “All in all, pretty good game. Well enough to win for sure. We’ve seen a bit of this movie the last month with some goaltenders playing real well against us where we didn’t get points, so at least we got a point in this one.”
Logan Thompson made 25 saves in the loss.
“I liked a lot of our game. Give their goalie credit. He’s an elite goaltender and he made a lot of big saves on us,” Eichel said. “We couldn’t figure out a way to get another one by him. There were a lot of positives from or our game. We play them again in two days, so we’ll be ready for that one.”
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