Golden Knights Pull Out 5-4 OT Win Over Utah In Third Preseason Game Thursday; Attendance, 14,809; Season-Opener Vs Chicago Tuesday
Story by Alan Snel Photos by J. Tyge O’Donnell
LAS VEGAS, Nevada — It’s season 10 for the Vegas Golden Knights, and Las Vegas fans call this arena home in a market economically built on visitors.
T-Mobile Arena occupies a special place for the Las Vegas market, which helped subsidize football and baseball stadiums to lure the NFL and MLB to Sin City. But nothing beats being born here and #VegasBorn still means something profound to the fans of this market’s first major league professional team.
The Golden Knights have shed their expansion team persona, with General Manager Kelly McCrimmon pulling off blockbuster trades and signings (Jack Eichel, Mark Stone, Tomas Hertl) through a decade of unprecedented success for an NHL franchise forged in the desert.
It was Hertl’s goal in the last minute of regulation to send the exhibition game against Utah into overtime. Eichel then scored in OT for the VGK 5-4 preseason win.
Jack Eichel
Tonight, new coach Ryan Craig — groomed by McCrimmon to assume the top bench job — gets his first crack at coaching the VGK in a preseason game after leading the Knights to exhibition game wins over LA and San Jose.
The Mammoth are in town after the Golden Knights defeated them, four games to two, in the Stanley Cup playoffs first round last season. Original Misfit Nate “Tell ’em Schmidtty sent you” Schmidt is here tonight for Utah.
It was odd to see the open seats around the venue. The Knights reported attendance at 14,809. Vegas typically sells out regular season games at T-Mobile Arena, where fixed seat capacity has been 17,367.
The Knights have two goalies who led the club to Stanley Cup appearances: Carter Hart (in the second year of a two-year $4 million contract) who started every game in the 2025 playoffs) and Adin Hill, who led to the VGK to the Cup championship in 2023. Hill started tonight.
Expect Hart to be considered the number one netminder.
Victor Olofsson, now in his second tour-of-duty with Vegas, scored a Pavel Dorofeyev-like goal in the first period. But Hill allowed two goals in the final two minutes of the period as Utah took a 2-1 lead into the first intermission.
Utah led, 3-1, after two periods before VGK outscored Mammoth, 3-1, in the third to send the game into overtime.
It will be interesting to see if Trevor Connelly and Olofsson can supply some goal-scoring to fill the void after Dorofeyev left for the New York Rangers.
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