LAS VEGAS — The goal that turned the Stanley Cup Final into a coin flip came from a 37-year-old captain stretched flat across the ice. With Game 4 tied in the third period, Jordan Staal lunged, left his feet, and swept the puck past Carter Hart, and the Carolina Hurricanes had the lead they would not give back in a 5-3 win over the Vegas Golden Knights on Tuesday night.
The series is even at two games apiece, heading back to Raleigh for Game 5 on Thursday. It was the first game of this Final decided by more than a goal, which says something about a series that has already produced a double-overtime classic and the fastest hat trick in the round’s history.
Staal is the reason the night belongs in the sport’s long memory. He has now scored in each of the first four games of a Stanley Cup Final, something no player had done in 44 years, since Mike Bossy in 1982, and only the fourth player of the expansion era to manage it, according to ESPN. His first goal of the night arrived 21 seconds into a power play, part of a first period Carolina controlled almost completely. His second was the dive. Centers his age are supposed to be managing minutes in June, not authoring the signature image of a Final.
The shape of the game followed the shape of the series. Carolina buried Vegas early, building a two-goal cushion through the first intermission behind Staal’s power-play strike and Jackson Blake’s sixth goal of the playoffs, with Logan Stankoven adding another. Then the second period arrived, the twenty minutes this series has reserved for the Golden Knights. William Karlsson and Brett Howden scored to drag Vegas level at 3-3, and CBS Sports noted the Golden Knights have now outscored Carolina 9-1 in second periods across the Final. Mark Stone had the earlier Vegas goal. For two periods the night looked like Game 3 all over again.
It did not finish like Game 3, and the difference started in Carolina’s net. Rod Brind’Amour handed the start to Brandon Bussi, the waiver-wire rookie, and sat Frederik Andersen, whose Game 3 unraveled in a four-goal second period. The coach framed it as maintenance, telling ABC before the game the plan was to let Andersen rest and give him as many days as the schedule allowed. It was also exactly the call this paper’s look at the team’s goaltending debate saw coming after Monday’s practice. Bussi wobbled through the Vegas surge, then shut the door when the game tightened, which is the entire job description in June.
The third period belonged to the older ideas of hockey: a faceoff won, a puck chipped behind a tired defense, a captain diving. After Staal’s go-ahead goal, Vegas pulled Hart, who finished with 20 saves, and Carolina hit the empty net inside the final minute to close it out. The Golden Knights, so comfortable manufacturing chaos in the middle period, never generated the equalizer the building spent ten minutes screaming for.
The result rescues Carolina from a hole that has buried nearly everyone who has fallen into it, and it deletes the scenario Vegas spent two days imagining. Three nights ago the Golden Knights survived one of the wildest games in Final history to take a 2-1 lead, and a win Tuesday would have given them three chances to close out a championship. Instead the Final is a best-of-three with two of the three games in Raleigh, where the Hurricanes’ forecheck has been at its most suffocating.
The open question travels east with the teams: who starts in the Carolina net on Thursday? Bussi earned the right to keep the crease, Andersen will have had five days of the rest his coach prescribed, and Brind’Amour gave no hint either way. He rarely does. The image that lingers from Game 4 is not a goaltender anyway. It is the captain, horizontal, thirty-seven years old, scoring in his fourth straight Final game while the rest of the sport checks the record books to find the last man who did it.
