LAS VEGAS — After Derek Carr led the Raiders to the brink of anoth­er vic­to­ry over the defend­ing Super Bowl cham­pi­ons, Las Vegas coach Jon Gru­den described his quar­ter­back as “almost flawless.”

That’s almost good enough to beat Patrick Mahomes and the Kansas City Chiefs, but not quite.

Carr went 23 of 31 for 275 yards and three touch­downs with a 119.7 pass­er rat­ing Sun­day night, but Mahomes matched Carr’s two scor­ing dri­ves in the fourth quar­ter with two of his own. Carr and Gru­den were left frus­trat­ed after Carr played like the three-time Pro Bowl quar­ter­back he is, only to be out­done by a Super Bowl MVP.

“It’s as good as you can play,” Gru­den said. “He had four or five balls that were mag­nif­i­cent throws that we could’ve caught that we didn’t make the play on. He played tremen­dous tonight.”

Before Sun­day, Carr was 21–2 in his career when the Raiders scored 30 or more points, a .913 win­ning per­cent­age that was fifth-best since 2014 among the 17 quar­ter­backs with 20 or more starts and 30 or more points scored. The Raiders also have won eight games under Carr when trail­ing by four or more points in the final two min­utes of regulation.

Carr near­ly hit all those bench­marks again. Las Vegas was in charge when Carr found Jason Wit­ten at the pylon with 1:43 left for his sec­ond TD pass of the fourth quar­ter, putting the Raiders ahead 31–28.

“I thought Derek Carr was in con­trol and com­mand the entire game,” Wit­ten said.

But Las Vegas’ defense couldn’t stop the Chiefs on their 75-yard win­ning dri­ve. Mahomes found Travis Kelce alone in the end zone with 28 sec­onds left.

Carr’s 31st pass was inter­cept­ed by Daniel Sorensen with 19 sec­onds remain­ing, seal­ing the vic­to­ry for the Chiefs and aveng­ing their home loss to the upstart Raiders last month.

The final inter­cep­tion wasn’t the rea­son the Raiders fell to 6–4 and dropped to the sev­enth spot in the AFC play­off picture.

There were eight penal­ties by Las Vegas. There was a defense that had key per­son­nel that hadn’t prac­ticed all week because nine play­ers were on the reserve/­COVID-19 list, and six weren’t acti­vat­ed until Sun­day morning.

And there were sev­er­al dropped balls that Gru­den men­tioned, but Carr refused to blame anyone.

“I’ve missed a lot of pass­es in my life, and I try to react the same way I’d want them to react to me,” said Carr, who sur­passed 25,000 career yards pass­ing on the Raiders’ first touch­down dri­ve in the first quar­ter. “If it’s (to) chal­lenge them, chal­lenge them. If it’s (to) pick them up, pick them up. You try to read their demeanor. That’s why you have rela­tion­ships with the guys, and you under­stand what makes them click.”

Fact is, they’ve been click­ing most of the sea­son. Carr is start­ing to find the form from his best sea­son in 2016, and he’s doing it for the first time under Gruden.

Carr, who passed for a career-high 4,054 yards in 2019, has thrown for 2,431 yards this year and is on pace to have a shot at his third 4,000-yard sea­son in four years with a slight uptick in pro­duc­tion over the final six games. But he is also lead­ing a much more diverse offense and tak­ing charge of a young group of play­ers feed­ing off his emotion.

“His con­fi­dence is on anoth­er lev­el, and I love that he’s tak­ing chances and tak­ing risks and stand­ing in there and mak­ing tough throws,” tight end Dar­ren Waller said.

Now more mature — the “old guy in the group,” as he put it after the loss — Carr knows his place when the team is either push­ing the tem­po in a shootout, like Sun­day against the Chiefs, or in a ground-and-pound strug­gle like the Raiders endured dur­ing a 16–6 win in Cleve­land on Nov. 1.

“This is the best offense I’ve ever been a part of,” Carr said. “I say it every week, but we can win in dif­fer­ent ways. We can smash them with the run game, or we can do a shootout. We’re prov­ing that over time. … Today it wasn’t enough.”