Hertl Scores Twice as Golden Knights' Ruthless Finishing Sinks Sabres 4-1

Buffalo carried the play for long stretches on Sunday afternoon. The Sabres had more of the puck, more of the looks and more of the danger. They left KeyBank Center with a 4-1 loss anyway, because the Vegas Golden Knights did what good teams do: they finished their chances, and their goaltender finished the rest.

Tomas Hertl scored twice, Mitch Marner added a shorthanded goal and an assist, and Adin Hill stopped 27 of 28 shots as Vegas stretched its winning streak to three games and improved to 12-5-2. Buffalo, which fell to 8-6-3, outshot the visitors 28-25 and generated chances worth nearly four goals on expected goals. It scored one.

The game turned in the second period, and it turned against the run of play. With Vegas killing a penalty, Marner struck shorthanded at 12:17 of the middle frame, and barely a minute later Jack Eichel doubled the lead, finishing a move set up by Ivan Barbashev. Two goals, 86 seconds apart, and a game Buffalo had been controlling was suddenly 2-0 the other way.

Hertl did the rest. The Czech centre, who has made a habit of hurting the Sabres, scored twice to put the result beyond doubt, finishing with two goals on three shots, a plus-2 rating and four hits. Marner finished with a goal and an assist, Barbashev added two assists, and Eichel put five shots on net in a busy afternoon.

At the other end, Hill was the difference. He stopped all 19 shots he faced through two periods, including 11 high-danger chances, and finished with a .964 save percentage. Buffalo found the iron instead of the net more than once, and by the time Beck Malenstyn finally beat Hill — his lone goal of the afternoon, set up by Mattias Samuelsson and Tyson Kozak — the game was already gone.

The supporting numbers told the same story as the scoreboard. Vegas outhit Buffalo 20-10 and blocked 23 shots to the Sabres' eight, throwing bodies in front of everything once the lead was theirs to protect. Neither team scored on the power play. Colten Ellis stopped 21 of 25 in the Buffalo net, but the gap in goaltending was stark: Hill's .964 dwarfed Ellis's .840, and in a game of fine margins that was the difference.

For Vegas, it was a third straight win and another reminder of why the Golden Knights remain one of the hardest teams in the league to beat even on an afternoon when they spend long spells chasing the puck. They did not need to dominate the game. They needed to be ruthless when it mattered, and Hertl, Marner and Hill were exactly that.

Buffalo, meanwhile, will look at the shot count and the chance count and wonder how it ended 4-1. That is the cruel arithmetic of hockey: the better team on the night does not always win, and on Sunday the team that finished its chances did.