Knights primary goal? Get healthy for the playoffs

LAS VEGAS — Right now, the most important member of the Golden Knights is Kyle Moore.

Who?

Moore is the team’s head athletic trainer. He’s been with the Golden Knights since the beginning eight years ago and it’s his job to have Bruce Cassidy’s players ready to go a week from Saturday when the Stanley Cup Playoffs begin.

If you think that’s an easy task, you haven’t been following this team closely. Through 79 games, the Knights have not had their full compliment of players available for even a single game. They came close on Dec. 12 in Winnipeg but Ben Hutton was out as part of that long stretch that saw him sidelined until late last month and was not available.

In fact, of the entire roster, only four players — Brayden McNabb, Noah Hanifin, Keegan Kolesar and Pavel Dorofeyev — have played every game this year.

Thursday against Seattle, the Knights welcomed back Tomas Hertl from his shoulder injury suffered against Tampa Bay back on March 23 and saw him miss eight games. He’s arriving in the nick of time as he was wielding a hot stick at the time of his injury — seven goals and three assists in eight games. They’re going to need Hertl to produce offensively during the postseason.

The Knights are also missing their best player, center Jack Eichel, who has an upper body injury and has missed the last two games. Alex Pietrangelo, Nic Hague and Victor Olofsson have been sick as some sort of bug has infected the locker room. A couple of other players reportedly have been under the weather but managed to play through it.

As bad as this seems to sound, the Knights have been through worse. You may recall the 2021-22 season when they had more than 500 man-games lost due to injury and wound up missing the playoffs for the only time in club history.

There are no such issues this year. Vegas is in the playoffs. The Knights will be having home ice advantage the first round. It’s just a matter of Moore and his staff managing what they need to manage, get everyone as close to 100 percent as humanly possible and give Cassidy the chance to coach the team he never had a chance to coach this year.

The reality is everyone is nursing something at this time of the year. Guys are banged up and playing through bumps and bruises. Or they’re dealing with illness. But they understand the deal and they’ll suit up and do what they have to run order to win. That’s what hockey players do.

“You hope whatever it is passes through quickly,” Cassidy said following Thursday’s 2-1 win over the Kraken at T-Mobile Arena. “The timing is not great. We’re trying to get healthy for the playoffs. But hopefully we don’t have it spread to others.”

The Knights have had enough depth this year top withstand anything short of a catastrophe. They survived lengthy absences to William Karlsson, Shea Theodore, Olofsson and Hertl. They’ve managed to keep Adin Hill healthy enough to play a personal best 49 games in goal this year, including Thursday’s win over the Kraken. The acquisitions of Brandon Saad and Reilly Smith have helped and getting record years from Kolesar and Brett Howden have had a lot to do with the team’s ability to stay atop the Pacific Division.

Cassidy said the team’s depth has held up through it all and it gives him a chance to play people like Alexander Holtz and Cole Schwindt while pairing someone like Hutton with Zach Whitecloud and see how that D-pair looks. He also got to give Akira Schmidt a spin or two in goal and in the event Ilya Samsonov doesn’t recover from his upper body injury in time when the postseason begins, Cassidy needs to know what he’s got in the Swiss netminder in the event Hill becomes unavailable.

So there is a silver lining to this cloud for the coach. His lineup gets a stress test if you will to see how it reacts with missing pieces to it.

Of course, three games still remain. Hill, who looked very good Thursday in stopping 24 of the 25 Seattle shots he faced, will likely play at least one of the remaining three games to stay sharp for the playoffs. There’s always the chance he or someone else gets hurt in one of those games. But you can’t put him in bubble wrap and then roll him out for Game 1 having sat for a week without seeing action. That’s not practical.

What Cassidy would like to do is give a couple of his regulars a little time off between now and the start of the playoffs. Maybe not have Mark Stone play in Calgary and/or Vancouver as Vegas finishes its regular season on the road. But to do that, he’d like to lock up the Pacific Division and that is one regulation win away. Perhaps it comes as early as Saturday when the Knights (48-22-9, 105 points) host Nashville and welcome back Stanley Cup hero and Conn Smythe winner Jonathan Marchessault.

Whatever Cassidy decides, he’ll do it in concert with Moore, who like his 15 other playoff-bound sports medicine colleagues, have the same task — that is to get the roster as close to 100 percent healthy by the time they drop the puck for Game 1 of the opening round of the playoffs next weekend.