Golden Knights Erase Tie With Three Third-Period Goals, Down Senators 4-1

Vegas scored three goals in the final 12 minutes of the third period to turn a 1-1 tie into a 4-1 final over Ottawa. The Senators had clawed back to even it up 34 seconds into the third, only to watch the game slip away entirely.

For 40 minutes, this looked like a tight, grinding hockey game — exactly the kind Ottawa needed. Vegas broke a scoreless deadlock at P2 19:49 when Braeden Bowman wrist-shotted his third of the year past Jonas Johansson, with Ivan Barbashev and Shea Theodore picking up the assists. That goal, shifting the margin from 0 to 1, was the turning point of the night — the moment Vegas seized control of a game that had been up for grabs. Johansson had been sharp all night, finishing with 25 saves on 27 shots, and Adin Hill was equally locked in on the other end, stopping 24 of 25.

Ottawa answered fast. Shane Pinto snapped home his third of the season just 34 seconds into the third period, assisted by Drake Batherson, and suddenly it was 1-1. That goal looks, in hindsight, like the high-water mark for the Senators. Vegas responded with the kind of third-period sequence that makes them a difficult team to play against: Raphael Lavoie put Vegas back ahead at 8:01 on a wrist shot, assisted by Nic Dowd and Ville Heinola — Lavoie's first of the season. William Karlsson made it 3-1 at 18:00, finishing off a setup from Trevor Connelly and Mitch Marner, Marner's 11th assist of the young season. Then, with Ottawa's net empty and the game effectively over, Jack Eichel buried a backhand at 19:53 — his seventh goal of the season — assisted by Mark Stone, to close it out at 4-1.

The story of the night was Vegas's third period. Three goals, four different scorers, and a suffocating structure that gave Ottawa almost nothing after Pinto's equalizer. Eichel's empty-netter was the exclamation point, but the real damage was done in that eight-minute stretch between Lavoie and Karlsson. For Ottawa, the effort from Johansson — 25 saves, only beaten twice in regulation — appears to be the one bright spot to take away. The Senators have shown they can score, having dropped 7 on the Rangers recently, but this was a different kind of test, and Vegas passed it convincingly.