Three takeaways

Enjoy the turkey. The Knights have to be feeling pretty good about where they stand heading into the holiday after coming home from the road trip with four points. American Thanksgiving represents an unofficial turning point in the NHL season and the Knights find themselves only two points out of a playoff spot despite their inability to string together wins thus far.

Heating up. Pacioretty’s recent scoring outburst has both him and coach Gerard Gallant feeling good about where his game is right now. He’s up to six goals on the year, which puts him behind only Jonathan Marchessault (10) and Cody Eakin (8) for the team lead despite missing four games due to injury.

Mixing it up. Gallant said when Nate Schmidt returned from injury he would likely look at some different combinations with his defensive pairings and he certainly did that on Wednesday. Schmidt was with old mate Brayden Mcnabb after playing with Shea Theodore the last two games. Theodore was with veteran Deryk Engelland and Nick Holden played with Colin Miller. The result was a pretty sound defensive performance. Adam Hill third period on the power play to tie the game, and the Coyotes (9-10-1) spent the final 1:55 of regulation with the man-advantage.

“That’s just us being resilient,” Theodore said. “Any time something like that happens, you can’t gettoodownonyourself. There’s lots of game left, and I thought we did a great job of winning that next shift and getting right back on the forecheck. That’s exactly what we needed.”

Despite a 7-2 thrashing at Calgary, the Knights come out of their three-game divisional road trip with four points and feeling much better ahead of back-toback divisional home games on Friday versus the Flames and Saturday against the San Jose Sharks.

Contact Adam Hill at ahill@reviewjournal.com or 702-277-8028. Follow @Adamhilllvrj on Twitter.