Well, it had to happen eventually. We'd been putting it off and pushing it back and wallowing earhole-deep in the adrenaline rush of it all, bouncing from Las Vegas to San Antonio to Raleigh to Manhattan in a poker game in which we'd finally reached the rarefied land of the eight-bet, but in our vacant, decrepit, spider-encrusted souls we all knew it would end up here: A normal game, played normally, with normal deeds, normal screeds and a normal result. Hardly seemed worth it in the end. Then again, after 10 full days of increasingly preposterous in-play behaviors and performances by the Golden Knights, Spurs, Hurricanes, and Knicks, something and someone had to give. And Thursday night, in Game 5 of the Stanley Cup Final, that something and someone was the Knights.
Carolina slowly but surely chokeslammed Vegas, 4-2, by playing sharp but thrill-free hockey that left nothing for the perpetually dissatisfied. After ceding the first period to Vegas—a first for the slow-starting Knights—the Canes seized the second, also a novel development, then took a two-goal lead and held it. They finally won a second period. Their best players, Andrei Svechnikov and Sebastian Aho, were finally their best players. The better team during the run of play won as they should, in regulation, and comfortably.
Not that there weren't moments of "Well, ain't that a hoot?" Erling Haaland, the world's most lethal striker, took an evening away from the Norwegian World Cup camp because he'd heard that American playoff games are drunk. Carolina's newbie goaltender Brandon Bussi burnished his legend as the new-age mini-version of Ken Dryden by coming from nowhere to give the Canes a suddenly clear advantage in net. They gave up three power-play opportunities to the Knights, all because they kept shooting the puck into the crowd. And most ridiculous of all, ABC's P.K. Subban maintained his place as America's human rummage sale, using Cam Newton’s cast-offs to distract us from the fact that his next observation of substance will give him an even two.
The Subban part, at least, was one of the most predictable parts of the series as a whole, which had been operating in tandem with the weirdest NBA Finals in decades. These 10 days had been working the outer edges of a disturbed screenwriter's mind since it began, and each game got progressively less comprehensible until the utter piefight of the Knicks' win in Game 4 Wednesday night. Game 5 of this series was the direct antithesis of all that, a handy reminder to a sizable audience that hockey doesn't typically operate the way these two teams did in Games 1 through 4.
The closest Vegas ever came to make you think that this game could play as irrationally as the four before it was when Pavel Dorofeyev scored his second goal of the game with six minutes and change remaining. That cut Carolina's lead to 4-2, bringing to mind the blown multi-goal leads that had defined this series, but that was as close as Vegas got.
In the meantime, Jordan Staal scored Carolina's first goal, the first person in 70 years to score a goal in each of the first five games of a Final, thus elevating himself as the Conn Smythe favorite despite finding the net just twice in three earlier rounds. More remarkably, Svechnikov and Aho, who had been conspicuous by their inconspicuousness throughout the postseason, scored the go-ahead and stay-ahead goals in the second. This was the first game that took a form and maintained it, the first game in which the home team acted like it, the first game in which Vegas was punished for its behavioral profligacy, taking back-to-back penalties (Jeremy Lauzon and Brayden McNabb) that led to Svechnikov's go-ahead goal.
That, and the loss of center William Karlsson midway through the second with an apparent left arm injury caused by a hit from Carolina defenseman Sean Walker, essentially killed the Knights' ability to create any meaningful reverse momentum. Karlsson is done for the Final, which will force John Tortorella to stretch the Vegas lines at the worst possible time.
Not that that news caused Tortorella to blink, of course. He said boldly that he intended to leave his clothes in his hotel room in Raleigh because he intended to return to coach Game 7, an interesting gambit which, given his take-home salary even in his two-month career in Nevada, is probably less of a gamble than it seems. I mean, he could leave the suit in lost and found and never miss it. It's that he livened up a somber press conference by saying he would do it that made folks sit up and take notice, which was more than could be said for the rest of the night—the first time this month that nothing out of pocket happened.
