For two days from the moment the clock struck midnight on Game 3, the Golden Knights have been expressing the same message. “We’re close, the bounces just aren’t going our way.”
As a veteran team that has been through the wars and successfully climbed the mountaintop, there was plenty of reason to believe them. At the same time though, playoff hockey is a zero-sum game, and in a few short days, a team can go from in control to hanging on for dear life. So, understandably, there’s been a lot of trepidation over whether or not those “bounces” would ever indeed come through.
After 40+ minutes of wondering if it would ever change, a wrestling match broke out between Tomas Hertl and Ryan Hartman, cascading both down to the ice slightly off to the side of Minnesota’s net. Mark Stone recognized the scrum and threw a low, hard pass along the ice towards. The puck careened off Hertl’s skate and slowly trickled into the net, giving the Golden Knights a lead in the 3rd period for the first time since Game 1.
It was fortunate, but not completely random as it may have appeared at first glance.
The Hertl one is for sure (a bit of puck luck). But I’ve seen Mark Stone do some really smart things that you look after and go ‘wow.’ I think he fired it over there with a purpose. We get the break on that one. -Bruce Cassidy
Even though the Wild came back and equalized a few minutes later, that go-ahead Hertl goal, the loose puck Nic Roy stuck in after a subpar four-minute power play, and the fact VGK had five power plays themselves, it felt like the tide had turned.
It seems like those are the bounces we weren’t quite getting the last couple of games. To have some of those go in and get some confidence from it is going to be big going forward. -Shea Theodore
It all culminated with the biggest goal of the series. Jacob Middleton made an uncharacteristic mistake in flubbing a dump out of the zone; a play quite similar to the ones that plagued Vegas in Game 2. Reilly Smith hopped on it and sent the puck to the front of the goal. Nic Roy and Ivan Barbashev battled in front, and eventually, the two-time Stanley Cup champion Barbashev shoveled it home.
The last one, that’s a little bit of playoff hockey where you converge to the net, find a puck, and hope that the goalie hasn’t tracked it quickly enough. Yeah, that was a big goal for us. -Cassidy
On a night in which the Golden Knights landed 46 shots on net, it was a pair of seemingly fortunate goals that won Game 4 and evened the series.
This is what it takes to beat a fairly evenly matched opponent in the playoffs. It’s not always going to be pretty.
In the O-zone we’re having more puck possession and finding ways to get pucks to the net. The first couple games interior ice was hard and maybe we didn’t do enough to try and spread them out and then get them to converge. That part of it I’m seeing progress. That’s how you get bounces, you throw enough of them to the net eventually you do get rewarded. -Cassidy
Sometimes you have to get “lucky” to find goals in the postseason. Like any game of chance, the more tickets you have in the lottery, the higher the probability one will hit the jackpot. In Games 2 and 3, the Golden Knights didn’t collect enough tickets, In Game 4, that changed, and it’s why the luck was finally on their side.
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