Jonathan Marchessault Was Trapped In The Penalty Box 

Here’s Vegas Golden Knights center Jonathan Marchessault trying desperately to exit the penalty box in the third period of last night’s game against Carolina, as boxmate David Perron tries to yank the door open and the officials seemingly argue about whether he should be freed or not. This seems like something they should have figured out ahead of time.

It’s slightly complicated what happened here, but again, it’s the officials’ jobs to know this. Perron and Trevor van Riemsdyk got into a scuffle, and both were given roughing minors and sent to the penalty box. But Perron was given an additional two minutes, also for roughing, so in order to give the Hurricanes their 5-on-4 power play, Marchessault was chosen to serve Perron’s additional penalty. The rulebook says players coincidental minors aren’t to leave the box until a stoppage in play, which meant Perron and van Riemsdyk had to stay there beyond the two minutes until the action stopped, but Marchessault should have been loosed immediately. He wasn’t, and he was pissed.

No harm no foul, as neither team scored on the improperly extended power play, but Carolina topped Vegas 3-2 in a shootout. Cam Ward stopped 22 of 24 shots for the 300th win of his NHL career, but the longer-term goalie story here was Marc-Andre Fleury’s return from IR after missing 25 games with a concussion. Fleury was excellent, saving 35 of 37 chances, and it’s going to be real interesting to see if the Golden Knights can keep their early hot start going, now that they’ve got their starting netminder back. Vegas is second in the Pacific, and unexpectedly they’ve done it with offense, sitting third in the league in goals per game. They can only hope their parade of goaltenders is over.