In Las Vegas, the visiting Vancouver Canucks scored three straight goals off the power plays and ripped the Golden Knights, 5-1, on Saturday.
Brock Boeser and J.T. Miller hit for power play goals in the fist period for 2-0 lead to the Canucks.
“I knew this team could play better than it was playing,” Vancouver coach Bruce Boudreau said.  “You see it and hope you can keep it going and elevate it to a point where you’re doing it automatically every night.”
Elias Pettersson added the third early in the middle frame to push the lead to 3-0.
“Special teams wins us games,” Pettersson said. “We’ve played good 5-on-5, but we got three on the power play, which was huge. They didn’t score on our PK (0-for-3). Special teams won us the game today.”
Spencer Martin made 26 saves in the Canucks win.
Vancouver improved to 8-10-3.
Jonathan Marchessault was the lone goal scorer for the Knights, his goal came in the third period with the Canucks up, 5-0.
“We actually were ready to play, which was encouraging. The first seven, eight minutes, we were the better team. We had some good looks,” Vegas coach Bruce Cassidy said. “In hindsight, when you’re playing your fifth game in eight days, if one of those goes in, maybe it gives us some juice and we’re not chasing the game. Their goalie made big saves. Then we got ourselves in penalty trouble and didn’t get the job done. That’s when I thought they were better than us in winning races and much more competitive.”
Vegas dropped to 16-6-1.
Vancouver extended the lead to 4-0 on a strike by Andrei Kuzmenko
Bo Horvat added a little insult by scoring with 1.4 seconds left in the middle frame for the 5-0 advantage.
Logan Thompson made 31 saves in the Vegas loss.
“It’s been a really taxing schedule. Maybe it caught up to us this weekend,” Cassidy said. “We couldn’t find that second wind, second effort that we needed. It’s not stopping. We have to mentally fight through.”
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