Golden Knights Bounce Back in Nashville, Beating the Predators 5-2 on Frozen Frenzy Night

NASHVILLE, TUESDAY, OCTOBER 13, 2026

On the loudest night of the young NHL season, the Vegas Golden Knights were the team still standing at the end of it. Vegas beat the Nashville Predators 5-2 in Nashville on Tuesday, Oct. 13, bouncing back one night after a 4-2 loss at Minnesota ended a four-game win streak, on Frozen Frenzy night — the NHL’s annual showcase in which all 32 teams play on the same day. According to NHL.com, the first game of the Frenzy started at 6 p.m. ET and the last one was not scheduled to begin until 11 p.m. ET, a wall-to-wall slate that turned one Tuesday in October into a league-wide event. The Associated Press, NHL.com and The Hockey News all reported the same result from Nashville: a tight game into the late second period, and then a Vegas team that found the next gear and never gave it back.

The win improved the Golden Knights’ road record to 3-1 and their overall mark to 6-2-0, and the way it arrived mattered as much as the number. One night earlier, on Monday, Vegas had lost 4-2 at Minnesota — the kind of defeat that can follow a team onto the next flight and into the next building. Instead, the Golden Knights treated Nashville as a fresh page. Road streaks in this league are rarely about brilliance. They are about surviving the stretches when the home crowd is loud and the legs are heavy, and then striking in the moments when the game briefly opens up. Vegas did exactly that, and the decisive strike came from one of the most reliable two-way players the franchise has ever had.

The scoring came early, and the first goal belonged to the home team. Ryan O’Reilly opened the scoring for Nashville at 3:55 of the first period, but Vegas answered twice in just over six minutes — Tomas Hertl tied the game at 6:46 and Jack Eichel put the Golden Knights ahead at 12:48 — and Hill protected the lead at 13:09, stopping a penalty shot. Nashville drew level at 8:45 of the second period, when Edstrom scored shorthanded to make it 2-2, and Juuse Saros finished with 20 saves for the Predators.

William Karlsson scored the go-ahead goal late in the second period, according to the Associated Press and NHL.com game reports — the goal that broke the night open and, as it turned out, stood up as the winner. Mitch Marner picked up an assist on the play, his fifth assist of the season, per The Hockey News and NHL.com. That pairing tells a story about how this version of the Golden Knights is built. Karlsson has spent his Vegas career doing the unglamorous work first — the matchups, the backchecks, the faceoffs that start defensive-zone shifts — and scoring in the moments when a game genuinely needs a goal. Marner, meanwhile, keeps stacking playmaking numbers early in the season; a fifth assist in October is the statistical shadow of a player who touches the puck in dangerous places shift after shift and keeps choosing the pass that makes a teammate’s finish easier.

If Karlsson’s goal was the hinge, the third period was the door swinging shut. Rookie Trevor Connelly scored to make it 4-2, his third goal of the season, and the numbers around the youngster are starting to demand attention: according to The Hockey News and NHL.com, Connelly now has five points in his first seven NHL games. Rookies are not supposed to look this comfortable this quickly, and they are especially not supposed to score the insurance goal in a one-goal road game late in the third period of a back-to-back. Connelly did, and the goal changed the temperature of the building. A 3-2 game invites one bounce to tie it. A 4-2 game, late, asks the trailing team to take risks it does not want to take.

Brett Howden supplied the exclamation point, sealing the result at 5-2 with his second goal of the season, per the Associated Press and NHL.com. Depth scoring is the phrase coaches reach for after nights like this, and for once the cliche is simply accurate: the go-ahead goal from a matchup center, an insurance goal from a rookie, and the closer from Howden is a scoring sheet that never asked one line to carry the evening. Behind all of it, Adin Hill made 25 saves, according to NHL.com and the Associated Press — a workload that reflects a Nashville team that kept generating enough to stay dangerous, and a goaltender who made sure dangerous never became damaging. Twenty-five saves will not lead the highlight shows on a night with 16 games, but road wins are built on exactly that kind of steady, unspectacular excellence.

For Nashville, the night was another chapter in an uneven early season. The Predators have been inconsistent since returning from a Canadian road trip, and Tuesday followed the frustrating version of the pattern: close enough to believe for two periods, undone by the sequence that decided the game. Karlsson’s late second-period goal is the one that will linger, because it arrived at the exact moment when a home team is trying to carry a tie into an intermission and reset. Instead Nashville spent the third period chasing, and chasing teams concede the kind of chances that produced the Connelly and Howden goals. The Predators stay home to regroup — San Jose visits on Thursday — and look for the consistency that has flickered without settling in the season’s opening weeks.

Around the league, Frozen Frenzy delivered the chaos the NHL designed it to deliver, according to NHL.com and The Hockey News live coverage of the night. Colorado beat Dallas 3-2 behind two goals from Martin Necas, in a meeting of two teams with genuine spring ambitions. Utah beat Toronto 5-4, the kind of high-event game that turns a staggered-start schedule into a channel-surfing marathon. Calgary earned its first win of the season, 3-2 over Anaheim — a result that matters more in a Flames dressing room than any single October two points usually does, because winless starts have a way of becoming the story. And Montreal won a shootout over Buffalo in which its shooters went 3-for-3, a perfect conversion rate in a skills competition that is never supposed to be predictable. Sixteen games, every team in action, and results landing past midnight in the East: that is the Frenzy working exactly as advertised.

Vegas’s place in that mosaic is worth underlining. Frozen Frenzy rewards depth, because nobody can hide on a night when the whole league is watching and every roster is being compared in real time. The Golden Knights won with their structure: a veteran center scoring the winner, a star winger creating it, a rookie finishing, a depth forward closing, and a goaltender making 25 saves without drama. If you missed the earlier game story from Nashville, our newsroom’s first report — Golden Knights pull away late in Nashville — has the period-by-period account, and the night’s other Frenzy finishes are in the Devils’ overtime win over the Red Wings and the Oilers-Kings late showdown. Follow everything else in our sports section.

The response to Monday’s loss in Minnesota, then, is complete: the road record stands at 3-1, the overall mark at 6-2-0, and the two-game trip ends in a split. October road trips do not win anything by themselves, but they do tell a team who it is. Through four road games, the Golden Knights look like a group that travels well: patient when the game is tied, ruthless when it tilts, and deep enough that the decisive goal can come from almost anywhere in the lineup. On a night when all 32 teams played, that might be the most valuable identity in the league.

Correction (October 14, 2026): An earlier version of this story wrongly described this win as extending a Vegas road winning streak. The Golden Knights had lost at Minnesota the night before — a defeat that ended a four-game win streak — so the Nashville win made them 3-1 on the road and 6-2-0 overall and split the two-game trip. The game’s early scoring (O’Reilly, Hertl and Eichel in the first period, and Nashville’s shorthanded equaliser in the second) has been added, and a passage saying the Predators would ‘head home’ has been corrected: Nashville was the home team and hosts San Jose on Thursday.