If you tuned into Game 3 of the Stanley Cup Final and thought Vegas was getting jobbed, you were not alone. The Golden Knights had not one but TWO goals erased in a single period, the kind of cosmic puck-luck swing that usually means a team is about to spend the offseason wondering what went wrong. First came the offsides challenge from Carolina, the most universally hated rule in hockey, which wiped a goal in what was still a 0-0 game.
Carolina wins the coach's challenge on a zone entry to erase the first Vegas goal.
Coast-to-coast, the offsides rule is the bane of every hockey fan's existence. A skate millimeters off the blue line, frame-by-frame freeze, and a perfectly good goal becomes nothing. elio summed up the universal feeling in one sentence, and honestly, who's arguing?
elio with the take that every hockey fan has screamed at their TV at least once.
Absolutely the worst rule in hockey!! Ruins the game!!
Then came goal number two off the board, this time for goalie interference, and that's when Dave Portnoy went fully nuclear. Cup Final, scoreless game, two goals vanishing in the same period — if you're a Vegas fan, the paranoia is doing pull-ups in your brain. Portnoy hopped on selfie cam and went full conspiracy mode.
Portnoy's kitchen rant after the second disallowed goal, complete with #rigged hashtags.
BigCat, meanwhile, was on the other end of the emotional spectrum — calm, resigned, and convinced this was the universe sending Vegas a memo. Two goals correctly waved off in the biggest game of the year is the kind of thing that gets pinned to the corkboard during the exit interviews.
BigCat reading the tea leaves and not loving what he sees for Vegas.
Having 2 goals taken off the board (both correctly) feels like a pretty bad omen for VGK
And then hockey did what hockey does. The Knights stopped feeling sorry for themselves, Mitch Marner went to work, and suddenly the rink flipped. Itchy for Mitchy, 2-0 Vegas in a blink, and the whole rigged-refs narrative got shelved in real time.
Marner finally puts one on the board that actually counts — Vegas 2, Carolina 0.
Of course, Portnoy being Portnoy, he immediately pivoted from RIGGED to remember-everybody-the-2-goal-lead-is-the-worst-lead-in-sports. Games 1 and 2 of this series both saw the team up 2-0 lose. You can't make this stuff up. But this time Vegas didn't blink — they kept pouring it on, and by the time the second period was wrapping, the only bad omen left was the one wearing red. BigCat called it in real time: the ass-kicking was happening, just not to the team he was worried about.
BigCat reversing course in the most BigCat way possible.
Guess it was…for Carolina. Ass kicking 2nd period
From two goals down on the scoresheet that should've been, to a 2-0 lead, to a full-on second-period beatdown — Game 3 was the kind of swing that defines a Cup Final. The refs giveth, the refs taketh, and then Marner makes them all irrelevant anyway.