In St Paul, the Minnesota Wild put together a near flawless opening 20 minutes on Thursday night.
They followed that up with an imperfect final 40 minutes in a 5-2 loss to the Vegas Golden Knights.
After taking a 2-0 lead in the first period, the Wild were stymied by the Knights defense and Marc-Andre Fleury who made 14 saves.
“Obviously when you get down by two, you always, you can get back in the game pretty quickly,” Fleury said. “You get that first goal and it’s 2-1, and there’s still a lot of time to be played in the game. I thought that was a huge call by our coaches, and after that in the second and third, I thought we took over and played so well.”
Ryan Hartman and Joel Eriksson Ek were the first period goal scorers for the Wild.
“We left Cam out to dry a little bit there — a lot,” Hartman said. “We gave them everything. We had no possession, no work ethic, no battle. We got away from our game, and we let them dictate. We gave them everything there.”
Mark Stone scored twice for the Golden Knights.
Reilly Smith and William Karlsson had single markers for Vegas.
“I don’t think we could have played any worse in the first period,” Smith said. “I felt like they were beating us to a lot of pucks, and we were playing slow. It seemed like we got our legs in the second period and kind of ran with it. We got a lot of power plays. We didn’t score (0-for-5), but we built some momentum, kept the puck away from our net for most of that second and third period, which goes a long way. Get some shots to the net, and we had some big blocks.”
Patrick Brown also scored for the Knights.
“The right guys scored tonight,” Golden Knights head coach Peter DeBoer. “‘Stoney’ needed to get a couple for us. He always brings effort and the same thing, but I think just for his own mental pressure and the pressure he puts on himself, he needed to stick one in the net — and he stuck two in the net. Reilly Smith scored again, he’s been snake-bitten all year and has really started to heat up late and scored again tonight. The right guys are scoring for us that need to score.”
Cam Talbot made 35 saves in the loss.
“We’ve been a resilient group all year … we always come back with our best the next game and I think we’re one of the few teams who didn’t lose three in a row this year and we need to build on that now,” Talbot said. “… We’re going to have to come out and give our best game and like we’ve done all year after a couple of losses, we’ve been an extremely good team at rebounding this year. We have a lot of character in that room and we’re extremely resilient, so I know we can put out a 60 minutes on Saturday that emulates the first period tonight.”
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