Shea Theodore scored in overtime Monday night as the Vegas Golden Knights outlasted the Utah Mammoth 5-4 in a Game 4 that swung from a 3-0 Vegas lead to a Utah comeback and then back again at the Delta Center in Salt Lake City.
The winner came after Pavel Dorofeyev appeared to finish the game only for officials to review the play for offside. Jack Eichel was ruled offside by only millimeters on the zone entry, and the source said only a single frame showed him offside. That left Theodore to settle an emotional roller coaster of a game that had looked finished, then lost, and then rescued again.
Vegas had built the 3-0 cushion early in the second period, but Utah sliced it to 3-2 when Nick Schmaltz and Ian Cole scored 29 seconds apart. The Mammoth kept pressing and then stunned the visitors with two goals in the first five minutes of the third period, from Michael Carcone and Clayton Keller, to grab the lead.
Brett Howden answered with his second goal of the game to tie it and force overtime. From there, the final sequence turned on the review that erased Dorofeyev's apparent winner before Theodore finished it. For the vegas knights, it was the sort of night that can define a series: frantic, thin on margin and decided by a detail measured in millimeters.
Cole Smith said the group expected swings like that, calling them huge ebbs and flows and calling it playoff hockey, especially in an away environment. The message, he said, was to stick together and play their game, and everybody stuck together. Smith also said he was right on the blue line when the reviewed play went through and that it looked close.
The result matters because Utah had won the previous two games and was trying to move within one victory of a 3-1 series lead, a position that has historically translated into a series win 91 percent of the time. Instead, the Golden Knights tied the matchup at 2-2 and sent it back into the kind of territory where one bounce, one review or one frame can turn the night.
