LAS VEGAS — Tomas Hertl scored a short-handed goal 11:17 into the second overtime to lift the San Jose Sharks to a 2-1 win over the Vegas Golden Knights on Sunday night, forcing a Game 7 in their first-round playoff series.

Just 31 seconds after Barclay Goodrow was called for slashing Brayden McNabb, Hertl collected a long lead pass from Marc-Edouard Vlasic and beat Marc-Andre Fleury with a wrist shot from the top of the left circle.

Logan Couture also scored for the Sharks, and Martin Jones set a franchise record with 58 saves. San Jose has won two straight after being forced to the brink of elimination.

Jonathan Marchessault scored for Vegas, and Marc-Andre Fleury stopped 27 shots.

Jones may have saved his best performance for Game 6, coming up with big saves to keep the Sharks in the game while under rapid fire.

With Vegas carrying momentum from Marchessault’s goal that tied the score with 8:40 left in the second period, Jones’ biggest save came against Reilly Smith, whose point-blank one-timer was stymied. Moments later, Jones snuffed out Mark Stone’s slap shot from the circle.

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The Sharks got on the board just before the end of the first period after Vegas defenseman Deryk Engelland misplayed the puck in the neutral zone. Couture gathered the puck, manuevered around Golden Knights defender Nate Schmidt and fired past Fleury’s glove side.

Marchessault tied it as he gathered a rebound off Shea Theodore’s shot from the point and lifted the puck over Jones’ right pad with a swift backhand. It gave Marchessault a goal in three consecutive games, and at least one point in four straight.

San Jose defenseman Brenden Dillon came up with a big play late in the game. Theodore caught Nosek in stride with a long stretch pass, but Dillon did a good job of not taking a penalty while swiping the puck away from Nosek.

Both goalies came up with big saves during the first extra period, first with Fleury stopping Kevin Labanc just after the puck drop, and later when Jones stopped Max Pacioretty’s one-timer with 9:57 left. But the biggest moment came with roughly three minutes left in the first overtime, when Fleury and Vegas defensemen Jon Merrill and Colin Miller combined to make several saves and keep the game going.

Hertl’s goal was the first short-handed winner in NHL history in a game that lasted more than one overtime.

CAPITALS: Braden Holtby isn’t one for grand pronouncements, so when he was asked if Washington’s blowout win over the Carolina Hurricanes in Game 5 of a first-round playoff series sent a statement, he put the spotlight inside the Capitals’ locker room.

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“To ourselves, I think,” Holtby said, “to show that when we play that way we’re going to be real tough to beat.”

The Capitals look as if they’ve found the swagger that led them to winning the Stanley Cup last year, and they can eliminate the Hurricanes in Game 6 on Monday night.

In a first round that has included three series upsets and two division champions already knocked out, the Metropolitan Division champions smell blood.

Washington is one win away from the second round and a showdown against former coach Barry Trotz’s New York Islanders. The Capitals blitzed the Hurricanes 6-0 on Saturday night, giving them a chance to close out the series on the road in Game 6.

“You don’t know the breaking point for any opposition,” Capitals Coach Todd Reirden said Sunday. “This was a big part of our success last year, that we needed to invest and force the opposition to play a difficult game, and eventually if you do it for long enough and you believe in the rest of your systems enough, you will break them.”

After winning Games 3 and 4 to even the series, the Hurricanes look broken. They’re without injured forwards Micheal Ferland and Jordan Martinook, and Coach Rod Brind’Amour said it’s “highly doubtful” rookie Andrei Svechnikov will be able to play, a week after being concussed in a fight with Alex Ovechkin.

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It looked in Game 5 as if the Capitals had figured something out about the Hurricanes. Goaltender Petr Mrazek allowed six goals on 28 shots, and now the pressure is on Carolina at home to stem the tide from a playoff-seasoned opponent that knows how to finish series.

“We’re going to be desperate,” Hurricanes center Jordan Staal said. “It’s playoff hockey and yeah, we’re facing elimination, so we’re going to be a desperate team and hopefully we play that way, and we compete better than we did last game.”

Even after losing forward T.J. Oshie for the rest of the playoffs because of a broken right clavicle, the Capitals want to continue the killer instinct they showed last year when they closed out every series in their first try on the way to the first championship in franchise history.

“We are sadly mistaken if we don’t think that effort and more is going to be required to win the elimination game against Carolina,” Reirden said. “We’ve got to again take our game up another level, and I’ll be challenging our players to do that in a difficult building. If we can do that, I think we give ourselves a good chance.”

ISLANDERS: Lou Lamoriello and Barry Trotz say they didn’t know exactly what to expect from the New York Islanders this season.

There were plenty of questions after the Islanders gave up 293 goals – the most in the NHL since 2006-07 – while missing the playoffs last season for the eighth time in 11 years. There was uncertainty on offense when star center John Tavares left in free agency for his hometown Toronto Maple Leafs.

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“There were a lot of unknowns. We had no preconceived notions,” Lamoriello said. “Whatever expectations there were, there were really none one way or another.”

The answers have come in the form of a stunning one-year turnaround that has the Islanders in the second round of the playoffs. New York gave up a league-low 191 goals, charged to the top of the Metropolitan Division and swept the star-laden Pittsburgh Penguins in the first round.

Knowing some had picked them to miss the playoff again, players just shrug it off.

“That’s kind of been a little bit of the story line here and we’re used to it,” said Anders Lee, who succeeded Tavares as team captain. “That’s just the way it’s been, not just this year, it’s kind of always been that way. This year we’ve really taken it on and run with it.”

Both Lamoriello and Trotz say they knew they were going to give up fewer goals with a better defensive approach.

“We wanted to play a certain way,” said Trotz, who was hired as coach in June after leading Washington to its first Stanley Cup championship. “We knew we could fix the goals against, that’s commitment and that’s work ethic, detail and structure.”

The 76-year-old Lamoriello, whose long career includes building the New Jersey Devils into an NHL power a generation ago, vowed to bring a culture change to the Islanders when he took over as the president of hockey operations last May. A few weeks later, he fired General Manager Garth Snow and Coach Doug Weight.

The Islanders have embraced Trotz’s swarming, defense-first system.

“It’s helped us all along,” said forward Josh Bailey, now the longest-tenured Islander in his 11th season with the team. “It’s a big part of our identity, and I think the more results we’ve seen as the season went on, the more belief (it fostered) in one another and what we were doing, and trust in our staff and everyone.”


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