ANAHEIM, Calif. — Nic Dowd looked around for some wood to knock on as soon as he heard the question after Sunday’s morning skate at Honda Center.
Dowd, the Golden Knights forward, settled for a tap to his own head, but that may not have been enough to satisfy the hockey gods.
“Why has this penalty kill been so good?” he was asked, quickly realizing he was tempting fate by even entertaining such a query.
Hours later, the Knights would surrender a pair of pivotal power-play goals to the Ducks in a 4-3 loss in Game 4 that evened the best-of-seven second-round series at 2-2.
The Knights will return to T-Mobile Arena for Game 5 at 6:30 p.m. on Tuesday and better hope their dominant penalty killing group returns with them.
That could certainly hinge on the status of captain Mark Stone, whose absence due to injury on Sunday probably played a significant role in the Knights having their streak of 21 straight kills snapped in the first period.
It was the first power-play goal they had allowed in the series and just the second of the postseason overall. They would give up another in the second period.
“It’s been pretty damn good for quite awhile here,” forward Colton Sissons said of the penalty kill. “Sometimes bounces will just go that way. It shouldn’t shake our confidence as a whole.”
But, let’s face it, it was only a matter of time.
Because as good as the unit has been in the postseason, and they have been phenomenal, you can only play with fire so often.
To their credit, they knew that. Coach John Tortorella has prefaced most of his answers about the elite penalty killing unit by saying they need to stop taking so many penalties and putting the group on the ice so often.
You might get a great piece of steak 10 times in a row when you go to Sizzler, but at some point you’re probably going to get an oddly cut fatty slice of unseasoned meat.
It’s just the law of averages.
“You’re not going to be perfect every night,” defenseman Brayden McNabb said. “You want to be, but they shot the puck a little more and they were getting bounces. It is what it is. We know we’re a good penalty-killing unit, so we’re not going to overthink it. We’ll be ready for the next one.”
They will need to be, especially if Stone remains sidelined. The team has not provided any update on the severity of his injury or how long he could be out of action and probably won’t.
It’s the postseason, and it’s a Tortorella team.
You’d have more luck getting the combination to Fort Knox than trying to pry injury information from him.
So the Knights are going to have to button things up.
More importantly, they need to stop taking unnecessary penalties. Especially at times when they are starting to find some rhythm in their game.
“You want to stay out of the box,” Tortorella said. “And I just felt like when we did take a penalty, we had some momentum and then we’d take the penalty. And they scored on a couple. We’ve been killing them off, and they scored on a couple. It’s a big part of the game.”
Huge.
The Knights particularly needed to find a way to get out of the second period tied, but Anaheim was able to grab a 3-2 lead with 2:02 remaining in the middle frame with its second power-play goal. An early third period tally allowed them to really jam up the neutral zone to try to protect the lead and made life very difficult on the Knights to try to establish anything offensively.
The Knights need to be better overall. They need players to step up in Stone’s absence. And they need to stop putting so much pressure on their penalty kill.
There’s a lot they must clean up to win what now essentially becomes a best-of-three series.
But they don’t believe their confidence has wavered in what has been their best unit.
“I think we have to be a little more disciplined,” McNabb said. “Took a few, and they got a few. They’re shooting the puck a bit more and getting some bounces around the net. But we know what to do and we have to keep going with how we were doing it and be ready for the next game.”
They better be.
Contact Adam Hill at ahill@reviewjournal.com. Follow @AdamHillLVRJ on X.
