Vegas down Lightning, 4-3, in OT

In Tampa, the Vegas Golden Knights broke a 1-1 tie in the third period on a pair of power play goals to take a 3-1 lead over the Lightning on Thursday night.

William Karlsson and Chandler Stephenson were the strikers for Vegas in the third.

“It’s tough [giving up a lead],” Karlsson said. “You want the two points, but you can’t really worry too much about it. You have to focus on the next shift, and that’s what we did. So, I think we answered pretty well.”

The Lighting rallied back with two goals of their own to tie the game, 3-3, and force extra time.

“I think we found our emotional needle in this game,” Vegas coach Bruce Cassidy said. “The little scrum or whatever probably dragged us into it. Now the temperature goes up. A couple of those shifts really got us engaged. I’ve always been ok with that for our group.”

Alec Martinez rescued the Golden Knights at 3:07 of the extra session to give Vegas a 4-3 win.

Jonathan Quick made 34 saves in his second straight win for his new tam.

“It’s a hockey game,” Quick said. “It’s that time of the year where every point is huge. It’s a great team over there, and we battled hard for those two points.”

Vegas improved to 39-20-6.

Tampa tied it in the third when Nikita Kucherov and Brayden Point (power play) scored 99 seconds apart for the 3-3 tie.

Tampa dropped to Lightning 38-21-6.

Point scored twice in the game, his first marker came in the first period to tie the game, 1-1.

“Overall, I thought our game wasn’t bad,” Point said. “We would’ve liked to get two [points], obviously. I thought our 5-on-5 game, for the most part, was good. We were skating, we were competing. That’s what we need right now to work our way out of a tough stretch.”

Tampa dropped to 1-4-2 in their last seven matches.

“I liked everything about the game,” Tampa Bay coach Jon Cooper said. “We deserved points tonight. You look at that little slide we had, this is a completely different team. I thought we were way better tonight than we were against Philadelphia (a 5-2 win on Tuesday). This is the best we’ve played in a while.”

Vegas had taken a 1-0 first period lead on a goal from Keegan Kolesar with just 27 seconds of fresh ice used in the first period.