Graney: Jack Eichel has LeBron-esque moment for winning goal
Mark Stone said it was more like basketball. Isolate the best player and let him go to work.
Jack Eichel did.
This is why you trade for him. Moments like this.
They won again, these Golden Knights, as hot a team as the NHL has known through the month of October save perhaps Boston. They won because Eichel made a terrific play to score as seconds were being counted down in overtime Sunday night.
Did a little one-on-one and stuffed the dunk — uh, puck — home.
LeBron would have been proud.
Golden Knights 2, Winnipeg 1.
Which is another way of saying the Knights outscored the Raiders 2-0.
Of course, the Knights also got the puck past the red line before two minutes remained in the third period, so it was a banner day for the local hockey team over that of football.
Dominating effort
Eichel would do what his team found nearly impossible all evening, solve Winnipeg goalie Connor Hellebuyck after driving to the net amid five other exhausted players on the ice.
“There were some tired bodies out there,” Eichel said. “I knew I didn’t have a ton of time — I heard the bench say there were 10 seconds left — to try and get to step back and get to the net and score.”
He would do so with seven seconds remaining and set off a bit of pandemonium from the 17,824 inside T-Mobile Arena, many donning their best Halloween costumes and bellowing with their loudest of voices.
It’s a fourth straight win for the Knights, who now embark on a five-game road trip back east. There’s also not a better way in which to hit the road for the season’s first extended time away.
Fact: This is the kind of game you often lose. One where you dominate an opponent — the Knights outshot Winnipeg 48-25 — but run into a brick wall in goal.
Hellebuyck was ridiculously good. He made saves most can’t. You should have seen some of the Grade A chances turned away by the Winnipeg goalie. Mamma mia!
Credit the Knights, though. Winnipeg actually scored 13 seconds into the third period for a 1-0 advantage, which was all sorts of frustrating for the team that had controlled things to that point. But the home side stuck with it. There was no panic.
“They were better than us for 30 seconds and had the lead, which kind of sucks,” Knights coach Bruce Cassidy said. “But you can’t abandon ship.”
The Knights are 8-2 and haven’t been lucky yet to win a game. They’ve earned each of those 16 points. Cassidy expects his team to keep improving. If so, this could be beyond a special season.
Top-notch goalies
Nobody — and I mean nobody — could have predicted how well the Knights would play in net to this point. Logan Thompson and Adin Hill have been top-notch.
It was always Cassidy’s plan to treat October as such — giving Thompson six starts and Hill four. The coach wasn’t going to deviate from such a rotation no matter how well or poorly one or the other performed. Worked to near perfection. We’ll see about November soon.
Stone would tie things at 1-1 at 7:13 of the third, and the stage was eventually set for overtime.
For a little isolation. Time for which the best of players live.
“Sometimes, these are the hardest games to win,” Eichel said. “(Hellebuyck) is one of the best goalies in the world, and he made some incredible saves. You let a team hang around like that and with a goalie playing like that … It’s important we got the two points there. We stuck with it the whole game. It was just a matter of getting one by him.”
They did. Twice. The last being one of those plays you might see run for LeBron.
Just let him go to work.
Jack Eichel did.
Moments like this, is right.
Ed Graney is a Sigma Delta Chi Award winner for sports column writing and can be reached at egraney@reviewjournal.com. He can be heard on “The Press Box,” ESPN Radio 100.9 FM and 1100 AM, from 7 a.m. to 10 a.m. Monday through Friday. Follow @edgraney on Twitter
