The Wild’s points all came from top-line skaters, and none had the gritty feel known to work in the postseason.
The Minnesota Star Tribune
April 21, 2025 at 11:00AM
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Whether you were hanging out at an old comedy club on the strip or watching the Minnesota Wild in T-Mobile Arena, your Las Vegas experience Sunday night would have been similar.
It was all about the one-liners.
The Wild’s top line produced both of the team’s goals, with Kirill Kaprizov setting up Matt Boldy on each one.
The other three lines produced nothing, and the Wild lost Game 1 of their NHL playoff series 4-2 to the Golden Knights, who produced the insurance goal with an empty-netter in the final second.
What the Wild were trying to prove Sunday was that their reconstituted lineup could reconstitute its early-season results.
The result: Not bad. But not good enough.
In December, before Kaprizov was injured, the Wild had the best record in the NHL. Without Kaprizov … they did not. By the end of the regular season, Vegas had the second-best record in the Western Conference, and the Wild had the seventh-best, meaning the Wild had to scramble to make the playoffs as a wild-card team.
The result for Buium was much the same as for his new team: Not bad. But not good enough.
Tomas Hertl gave Vegas a 1-0 lead in the first period with a bad-angle shot over Wild goalie Filip Gustavsson’s shoulder.
The Wild responded with the kind of play they need to create and take advantage of often. Ryan Hartman carried the puck over the blue line, wisely dished to Kaprizov along the right wall, and Kaprizov made one of his quintessential skill-and-savvy plays, faking a slap shot and sliding the puck across the ice to Boldy, who buried the puck to tie the score.
Despite typically physical play from Vegas, neither team drew a penalty until the second period, when Wild center Joel Eriksson Ek was called for high-sticking.
About five seconds later, Pavel Dorofeyev buried a slick pass from Shea Theodore to make it 2-1.
Going into the third period of a road playoff opener down one goal could have been considered promising, but Vegas scored early in the third to make it 3-1, on Brett Howden’s fast-break goal with 17:32 remaining.
Vegas had outshot the Wild 19-16 at that point, and had come dangerously close to breaking the game open. Brandon Saad had hit the post on a breakaway, and Jack Eichel had been stuffed by Gustavsson on another.
Conspiracy theorists could cite a missed call in the third period, when Nicolas Hague cross-checked Hartman in the face during a puck battle.
Was that a missed call? Yes. Did that decide the game? We’ll never know … but probably not.
Don’t let that call distract from the truth: The Wild needed their skill players to come up big against a tough, physical team, and only two did.
The Wild received their first power play with 12:47 remaining. They did nothing with it, against a Vegas penalty kill that has been a weakness for the Golden Knights all season.
Kaprizov made the play that led to the Wild’s second goal, holding the puck at the blue line, then sliding it to the front of the net, where Boldy eventually tucked it in. It was 3-2.
Boldy had one career playoff goal before Sunday. Now he has three.
The Wild’s first line produced.
Their other lines not only didn’t produce, they rarely threatened. And their defensemen produced nothing on offense, seeming tentative until they had no choice but to play with desperation.
The popular cliché is that winning in the playoffs requires “greasy” goals — going to the front of the net, getting deflections, burying rebounds, screening the goalie, drawing penalties.
Sunday, the Wild never got greasy. Their goals were pretty, their results were not.
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