In Winnipeg, Jack Eichel and Nicholas Roy scored in the final four and half minutes of the third period to help send the Vegas Golden Knights to a 5-3 win over the Jets on Thursday night.
Eichel scored off the power play for a 4-3 lead after the Jets had knotted the game, 3-3, on a marker form Alex Iafallo.
“I was just trying to get a shot on net,” Eichel said. “I didn’t see it go in. We’re not going to play our best every night, but a ton of credit to our goalie, and we found a way to score some goals down the stretch. Good teams find a way to win, and we found a way to win. Obviously, we’ll take the two points tonight.”
Logan Thompson made 36 saves in the Vegas win.
“[Thompson] certainly did his job. We have to give him a lot of credit,” Golden Knights coach Bruce Cassidy said. “We were playing pretty well in front of him, and in the second period we seemed to have things in hand and [were] playing the right way, and then it just got away from us. A lot of that’s on us. Give Winnipeg credit especially in the third the way they came out. They won a lot of races and battles.”
Iafallo’s first of two on the night gave the Jets a 1-0 lead 90 seconds into the first period.
“It’s frustrating to lose, obviously,” Iafallo said. “You want to win every game, but we are just going to stay positive. I feel like we are doing a lot of good things. We need to clean up some mistakes, but at the same time we are just going to keep climbing, climbing that mountain.”
Vegas tied it, 1-1, on a power play marker from Jonathan Marchessault at 17:42 of the opening frame.
Vegas scored at 49 seconds of the middle frame on a strike by Brett Howden for a 2-1 lead.
“The end result stings,” Jets coach Rick Bowness said. “That was a great third period. Give their goalie a lot of credit. He made all those key saves. That being said, we just can’t keep giving up four, five goals a game. We’re not going to win until we stop that. Which means we’ve got to clean up our zone. Our turnovers in our zone are really costing us.”
At 15:27, Alec Martinez pushed the advantage to 3-1.
“We’re playing the Stanley Cup champions,” Bowness said. “They’re big, they’re strong, they’re aggressive and we’re making soft plays. We’re shooting ourselves in the foot.”
Just 33 seconds later, the Jets’ Cole Perfetti trimmed the deficit to one, at 3-2.
Laurent Brossoit made 22 saves in the Jets loss.
“It’s a mental thing, there’s no question,” Bowness said. “When you want to get the puck out of your zone, you make high percentage plays. You make hard plays. We’re making poor percentage plays and we’re making soft plays. It’s a bad combination.”
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