Marner Keeps Knocking, but Carter Hart's Night Goes Sideways
The Golden Knights outshot Tampa Bay by a wide margin and still dropped a 6-2 decision at home to the Lightning.
Written during the game · 1:21 AM ET. Final was TBL 6, VGK 2.
Mitch Marner did everything a forward can do to drag Vegas back into this one, and the scoreboard never noticed. He finished without a goal, with one assist on Ivan Barbashev's tying goal in the first period.
The evidence is in the looks he kept getting. Marner put five shots on goal, the most of any skater in the game, and his chances were worth 0.56 expected goals (how many goals an average shooter would score from those chances). That is more than half a goal he had every right to score, over 17 minutes of ice time.
Andrei Vasilevskiy stopped 32 of 34 shots, and the Lightning goalie saved well more than the chances said he should. Meanwhile, Tampa Bay won 6-2 even though Vegas put up 34 shots to the Lightning's 21.
Marner played alongside Brett Howden and William Karlsson. The finishing never arrived for him, but the chances did.
Vegas is 8-2-0 and sits first in the Western Conference, so this loss is a bruise, not a verdict.
