ST. PAUL, Minn. -- Bruce Cassidy is a veteran coach, coaching a veteran roster for the Vegas Golden Knights.
As such, he has no concerns about the ability of his team to park a 5-2 home loss to the Minnesota Wild in Game 2 of the Western Conference First Round on Tuesday, in which the Golden Knights fell behind 3-0 in the first period.
Cassidy knows his team, with many of the same players who won the Stanley Cup two seasons ago, will be ready for Game 3 at Xcel Energy Center on Thursday (9 p.m. ET; FDSNNO, SCRIPPS, MAX, truTV, TBS, TVAS2, SN360).
“These guys have been in enough playoff series to know that it’s a best-of-5 now and Minnesota has home-ice advantage,” Cassidy said. “That’s what is in front of us. We are much more worried about Game 3 than worried about the whole series. How do we get back into the winner’s circle?”
The stakes are high; when a best-of-7 Stanley Cup Playoffs series is tied 1-1, the winner of Game 3 goes on to win the series more than two-thirds of the time (386-175; .688). The team starting the series at home owns an all-time record of 249-87 (.741), while the team starting on the road is 137-88 (.609).
For the Golden Knights, the road to redemption starts with puck management. Vegas had Game 2 going its way during the opening five minutes, registering the first five shots of the game and putting Minnesota on its heels, but then got sloppy with the puck in each of the three zones and paid the price.
“It’s correctable,” Cassidy said. “As a coach, you say, 'OK, we fix 10 minutes of puck management, what did they get, what did they get on us?'”
With that said, Cassidy is not foolish enough to look at the final 30 minutes of Game 2 when the Golden Knights played better and say all is well.
“Time and score, they're up 4-0, they're not going to try to make it 10-0, he said. “They're a good defensive team, so you have to factor that in, that they're going to be a bit more cautious.”
Vegas center Jack Eichel insists it is all about what his team is capable of and not what Minnesota did two nights ago. If the Golden Knights play they the way did in Game 1, a 4-2 victory on Sunday, things will be just fine.
“What they got in Game 2, a lot of it was probably self-inflicted,” Eichel said. “We just have to make them earn everything they get. Obviously there is desperation, there is a competitive level that needs to rise from all of us, and we’ll be ready to go tonight.”
Here is a breakdown of Game 3.
Golden Knights: Look for a road-warrior mentality from Vegas, which was 21-13-7 away from home during the regular season. The Golden Knights go four lines deep and trust each of their three defense pairs, so line matching is not as much of a concern as it could be. Cassidy said he likes what playing on the road, especially in the playoffs, does to a team’s psyche. “Your focus gets narrowed, that’s just the reality of it,” he said. “That is the advantage. It’s them, it’s hockey and sometime that is sort of enough to get you back on track.”
Wild: Coach John Hynes will dress the same lineup from Game 2. Despite limited ice time for the Wild’s third defense pair of Zeev Buium and Zach Bogosian, who each played less than 13 minutes, as well as the fourth line of Yakov Trenin, Marco Rossi and Justin Brazeau, none of whom played more than 11 minutes, Hynes said the instinct to change things wasn't fully there. “We don’t take these things lightly, as you can imagine,” he said. “From postgame to yesterday to last night to this morning, you go through a lot of different things. Then there’s a lot of different components that go into making a lineup decision. And I think that we liked a lot of our game for the last two games.”
Number to know: 23, the number of hits Wild forward Marcus Foligno has in this series. He set a Minnesota playoff record with 12 hits in Game 2. Those 23 hits are the second-most during a two-game playoff span since 2005-06, when hits first were tracked as an official League stat.
What to look for: How Vegas defends Minnesota’s top line of Joel Eriksson Ek between Kirill Kaprizov and Matt Boldy. Kaprizov has five points (two goals, three assists), and Boldy scored the first three goals for the Wild in this series. Eriksson Ek doesn’t have a point but has a Wild-high seven shots on goal. To make matters worse for the Golden Knights, the Wild have the last line change and get to dictate the matchup. “They’re real creative and make a lot of east-to-west plays,” Vegas defenseman Noah Hanifin said. “They have high-skill players who read off each other well. It’s something we have to be better on them and harder on them, because they drive a lot of their offense.”
