Vegas Golden Knights: 1st in Pacific Division, 110 points
Minnesota Wild: 1st Western Conference Wild Card, 97 points

Schedule (ET)

The Skinny

If you had asked Golden Knights fans which Western Conference wild-card contender they wanted to see in the playoffs a week ago, they wouldn’t have taken long to blurt out “Minnesota!”

The Wild haven’t exactly set the world on fire down the stretch, or at any point since the turn of the year. 

Save for a brief three-game return to the lineup in January, superstar Kirill Kaprizov, an early Hart contender, was out from late Dec. 22 until April 9. In that time, Minnesota was 21st in points % (.523), with a goal differential (-21) and play-driving (47.39% expected-goal share) to match. Woof.

Top center Joel Eriksson Ek, captain Jared Spurgeon, and Team Sweden’s Jonas Brodin had injuries of their own during that span, but the months-long funk nonetheless exposed just how much the Wild rely on the heroics of the mercurial winger and excellent goaltender Filip Gustavsson (2.56 GAA, .914 SV% in 58 GP) to bank points.

Do the Knights have cause for concern now that Kaprizov is back? When ‘Kirill the Thrill’ is in the lineup, Minnesota’s winning percentage balloons to 61%.

Still, Vegas is uniquely equipped to shut down any single star player. Jack Eichel’s defensive maturation has meant they can stack four different matchup centers in front of a towering blue line and playoff ace Adin Hill. 

The Knights are a tough nut to crack, and, after an injury-plagued year full of roster turnover last season, are eager to get their hands on the Stanley Cup for the second time in three seasons.

It will take a monumental upset for the Wild, who haven’t advanced to the second round in a decade, to derail the Pacific Division champs in the conference quarterfinal. 

Head to Head

Vegas: 3-0-0
Minnesota: 0-3-0

Suppose the Wild are looking for a reason to believe they can pull this off. In that case, they won’t find it in their regular-season record against Vegas, who beat Gustavsson, Marc-Andre Fleury, and even top prospect Jesper Wallstedt in separate matchups.

Minnesota kept it close in Kaprizov’s only appearance, when the sniper scored both their goals in a 3-2 defeat on Dec. 15. They were not so lucky in their meetings without No. 97, losing 4-1 on Jan. 15 and 5-1 last month.

The Wild will be particularly concerned with their inability to slow down Eichel, who had a two-assist night against them in December and burned them for a hat trick on March 25 after missing the January meeting.

Top Five Scorers

Vegas

Jack Eichel, 94 points
Mark Stone, 67 points
Tomas Hertl, 61 points
Shea Theodore, 57 points
Pavel Dorofeyev, 52 points

Minnesota

Matt Boldy, 73 points
Marco Rossi, 60 points
Kirill Kaprizov, 56 points
Mats Zuccarello, 53 points
Frederick Gaudreau, 37 points

X-Factor

Size still matters in the playoffs. Since 2017, only two Stanley Cup-winning teams have ranked outside the top six in mean weight. The correlation isn’t perfect (and didn’t exist at all from 2015-17, when the bottom-three teams in weight hoisted the Cup). But, in general, it’s the bigger, stronger players who are best equipped to survive the grind of the postseason.

That doesn’t bode well for Minnesota, the shortest and fifth-lightest team in the NHL. A small roster isn’t a death sentence, but the disparity in size between the Wild blue line and Vegas’s forwards is particularly striking.

The Knights are the second-heaviest team in the league; much of that muscle is found up front. The guys that hit, like Ivan Barbashev and Keegan Kolesar, do so with devastating effect. The ones who don’t, like Brandon Saad (215 pounds) and captain Mark Stone (210 pounds), are a handful in the corners and around the crease.

Jake Middleton notwithstanding, the Wild’s top four is a slight group that is at its best killing rushes in the neutral zone. How will Spurgeon, Brodin, and Faber cope if Vegas’s towering forwards set up deep in their zone for extended periods?

The biggest challenge, literally and figuratively, will be clearing out 32-goal scorer Tomas Hertl, a 220-pound behemoth who loves to make himself at home around the blue paint on the power play. It could be a short series if Minnesota can’t neutralize the hulking Czech.

Offense

The story of Vegas’s sixth-ranked offense starts with Eichel, whose explosive skating and playmaking made him one of the most highly-touted collegiate prospects of all time out of BU. Historically, Eichel’s injury record has kept him out of the NHL’s upper echelon of scorers, but, in his healthiest season (77 GP) since leaving Buffalo, the Team USA standout finished eighth in points (94) and sixth in assists (66). 

Eichel has benefitted from playing on a line with Stone since Chandler Stephenson left in free agency, and the Knights’ signature players are flanked on their off-wing by Barbashev. The Russian power forward has been a handful during both of his postseasons in Sin City (21 points, 105 hits in 29 GP).

The Golden Knights’ pricey center depth left them little cap space to spend on the wing, but GM Kelly McCrimmon has made it work. Pavel Dorofeyev has broken out as one of the NHL’s top volume shooters (35 goals, 254 SOG), Brett Howden (23 goals) has been a reliable Swiss Army knife, and veterans Saad and Victor Olofsson have revived flailing NHL careers in Vegas.

Those forwards have contributed to the Golden Knights’ top-seven even-strength goal share (54.28%), but the team’s knockout punch is a second-ranked power play (28.3%). Shea Theodore (57 points in 67 GP) mans the blue line as Eichel (34 PPP, seventh in NHL) and Dorofeyev (13 PPG, T-15th) flank Stone in the bumper and Hertl (14 PPG, T-5th) at the net front. It’s a star-studded unit worth losing sleep over for the Wild’s 30th-place penalty kill (72.4%).

Minnesota’s most dangerous player combination takes the ice at even strength, where Kaprizov and two-way force Eriksson Ek have been joined by the rapidly improving Matt Boldy (career-high 47 assists and 20:17 ATOI) over the last few games. Coach John Hynes took a gamble by stacking his three best forwards on the same line as the Wild fought to protect their playoff position, and it worked; the unit has been irresistible, doubling opposition scoring chances (74-37) in their minutes.

Though Minnesota’s offense plummeted to 25th overall while Kaprizov was out, the Russian’s line isn’t doing all the work. Ageless wonder Mats Zuccarello helped drag the Wild into the postseason with nine points over his final seven games, veteran power forward Marcus Foligno came alive down the stretch with seven points in his last nine, and the Wild have converted at a top-10 clip (25.4%) on the man advantage since the Four Nations break.

One major contributor who hasn’t stepped up in crunch time so far is Marco Rossi; the Austrian centerman was on a torrid pace going into the break (19 goals, 47 points in 56 GP), but has looked worn-out since, scoring at a 41-point pace with an ugly -12 rating. It won’t get any easier for the diminutive sophomore against Vegas, but he has to provide a scoring threat if the Wild expect to go on a run.

The blue line hasn’t generated a ton of offense after a big year-over-year decline in production for Faber (29 points after 47 in 2023-24). Collegiate star Zeev Buium could get a shot to quarterback a power play unit as early as his Game 1 debut.

Defense

Vegas finished with the league’s fifth-best scoring ‘D’ despite the declining play of Alex Pietrangelo, whose midseason snub of Team Canada was probably his last chance to don the Maple Leaf. 

‘Petro’ more than doubled his previous career-high in giveaways, and a mega-pairing with Noah Hanifin that should have worked (57% high-danger chance share) consistently found itself on the wrong end of the scoreboard. Coach Bruce Cassidy was sick of waiting for their league-worst luck (.958 PDO as a pair) to change, and mixed and matched them with bottom-four bangers Nic Hague and Zach Whitecloud.

Theodore hasn’t had similar issues finding a match. He’s partnered with Brayden McNabb, who looks and plays like he eats rusty nails for breakfast, on and off for as long as the Golden Knights have been a franchise. The duo is 13th in the NHL in even-strength ice time despite another injury-shortened season for Theodore and will continue to eat up big minutes in the playoffs.

Further up the ice, Eichel has probably earned down-ballot Selke votes, and Stone, a two-time finalist for the award, remains a steady on-ice leader. The real matchup line, though, is that of ‘Wild Bill’ Karlsson, whose connection with new-old Golden Knight Reilly Smith hasn’t dulled a bit. Kaprizov can expect to see plenty of the revived ‘Misfit Line.’

The Wild will feel that their defensive personnel can match any group in the league player for player, but injuries and an icy second half have prevented the numbers from reflecting that; Minnesota finished 16th in scoring defense and had a negative goal differential on the season. 

Anyone who watched the 4 Nations Face-Off would have noticed Brock Faber’s excellent defensive play, but the former Golden Gophers’ captain has looked gassed at times in Year 2. His offense has wilted under the strain of another 25-minute nightly workload. More concerningly, Faber has found himself pinned in his own zone with regularity, and uncharacteristic mistakes have followed.

Hynes has stuck the 22-year-old with speedy Swede Jonas Brodin to get him back on track, and it seemed to work during critical late-season wins over Vancouver and Anaheim; the Wild outshot the bad guys 28-14 in the 50+ minutes the duo was on the ice at five-on-five.

That leaves the ever-reliable Spurgeon (55.54% expected goal share) back on a pair with Middleton, a big Alberta boy who took the long way to the NHL but has become a legitimate second-pair option. They haven’t played together much over the past two seasons, but in over 1,000 minutes together at five-on-five in 2022-23, the Wild led the opposition 43-28.

Goaltending

Adin Hill (2.47 GAA, .906 SV%) has a classic “really good defense stat line.” His overall numbers don’t hold a candle to those of Gustavsson, who could be in line for a podium finish for the Vezina Trophy, but the Golden Knights are supremely confident in their man for two reasons.

The first is Hill’s stat line (12-3-1, 2.11 GAA, .920 SV%) since the 4 Nations, where he dressed for Team Canada but never sniffed the ice. The de facto vacation interrupted the most taxing workload of Hill’s career, and he’s come back refreshed. Hill has played so well down the stretch that McCrimmon gave him a fat contract. And he always honors those.

The second? Hill is a beast in the playoffs. He took over in unconventional circumstances in 2023 to lead the Golden Knights’ Stanley Cup charge, and though he lost the cage to Logan Thompson ahead of Game 1 of last year’s first round, he looked good when he did get the nod against Dallas. All told, Hill has stopped a ridiculous .932% of the shots he has faced in a not-insignificant 19-game playoff sampling.

Gustavsson has just five playoff appearances, but his unflappable focus kept the Wild alive this year and should suit him well in the high-pressure environment of the postseason. ‘Gus’ is perpetually aware of his posts and square to the shooter, but he’ll need to pull out some highlight-reel stops to knock off a Vegas team that figures to have a big advantage in shots.

Injuries

Both of these teams have battled the injury bug all season, with only three skaters from each side (Dorofeyev, Kolesar, McNabb for VGK; Boldly, Gaudreau, Rossi for MIN) hitting the 82-game mark, but neither has any official injuries going into Game 1.

For Vegas, it will be interesting to see how Cassidy, who has been without one of Hertl or Eichel for nearly a month, will deploy a full complement of players. Howden has been a stopgap center at various points throughout the season, but with Eichel, Hertl, Karlsson, and Nic Roy seemingly ready to go, he should shift to the left wing.

The Wild rushed all their key players back to health for what were essentially postseason contests over the past two weeks. That gave Kaprizov a few games to get his legs under him ahead of the playoffs (22:58 ATOI since 4/9 return).

Intangibles

McCrimmon and the Golden Knights are the NHL’s kings of splashy moves. Whether they’re sending beloved veterans to the glue farm, dealing former first-rounders, or acquiring stars they shouldn’t be able to fit under the cap, there’s always another trick up their sleeve. 

Is that still true? Saad and Smith were creative midseason additions, but, despite the constant turnover that’s marked its brief NHL history, Vegas is all but locked into place. The Hertl and Hanifin trades from last season, along with lengthy extensions for Theodore and Hill, ensured any further changes to this roster would be around the fringes. 

McCrimmon made his bet that adding Hertl and Hanifin would yield more Cups. He’d better hope that happens soon with so little help expected from the draft and so many key contributors wading into their mid-thirties.

The Wild are on an expiring timeline of their own, except without any preexisting championships to fall back on. Kaprizov, the most electrifying talent in the history of the franchise by some distance, becomes eligible for an extension this summer. The ~$15 million in dead cap that comes off the books this offseason was supposed to bankroll a Cup team built around him. Instead, it’s been spent on contracts for Faber and veterans like Middleton, Foligno, and, bizarrely, Yakov Trenin.

A strong pipeline promises to bolster the lineup with more Fabers and Buiums, but is that enough to convince the 28-year-old to stick around? The organization hasn’t come close to winning during his illustrious tenure, and the Wild’s struggles without Kaprizov only increased his already gargantuan bargaining leverage. A spirited performance this postseason would give GM Bill Guerin measurable proof his project (and a LOT of money) is worthy of the rest of Kaprizov’s prime.

Series Prediction

The Wild looked sick to death of their cap woes this season as injury after injury rolled in and they struggled to keep 23 warm bodies on the active roster. Losing Karpizov took the wind out of their sails, and it hasn’t come back, even if he has. 

The ruthlessly efficient Golden Knights are a nightmare matchup for a team still trying to find its groove. That every other series in the Western bracket has the makings of a war will only increase their urge to put away Minnesota quickly and pounce on a tired Round 2 opponent. The first part of that equation should be simple for Eichel, Hertl, and Co.

Golden Knights in four games.

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