John Tortorella has taken the Vegas Golden Knights to another level in the playoffs, turning their penalty kill into a weapon and their short-handed play into a source of goals. After 10 postseason games, Vegas has climbed to an 87.5 percent penalty-kill rate, second best among teams that have played that many games.
That is why Nhl Standings searches around the Golden Knights now go beyond the usual race for seeding and into how one of the league’s most complete teams is winning different kinds of games. Vegas scored only six short-handed goals in the regular season; it already has four in the playoffs, and it has allowed only five goals while down a man. The math leaves the Golden Knights at minus-one while shorthanded, but the larger point is that those moments have started swinging games instead of merely surviving them.
Brett Howden has been at the center of that change. He has scored three short-handed goals in the playoffs, and he has done it on a unit with Mitch Marner, while Jack Eichel and William Karlsson have formed another short-handed group. Marner has four playoff points, a sign that Vegas is not just clearing pucks but creating pressure and chances the other way.
The Golden Knights were already a high-end, Cup-winning team, which is what makes the timing of the coaching change so hard to ignore. Yet the move has been followed by a playoff penalty kill that is markedly better than the one they used in the regular season, when they ranked seventh in the NHL at 81.4 percent. Tortorella’s teams have long carried that same edge, too; over his past three seasons in charge of the Philadelphia Flyers, they finished no worse than second in the NHL in blocked shots, and Philadelphia led the league in 2024-25.
That history fits the present shape of Vegas: tight, stubborn and willing to turn defensive work into offense. Tortorella’s 2019 Columbus Blue Jackets swept the Tampa Bay Lightning in the first round, and this version of the Golden Knights now looks capable of forcing opponents to play in the kind of grind that can change a series. The next question is not whether Vegas can kill penalties. It is whether it can keep doing it against better teams, because the short-handed goals have already become part of how the Golden Knights decide playoff games.
