In St Paul, the visiting Vegas Golden Knights scored four times in the middle frame in a 5-1 win over the struggling Wild on Thursday night.
Logan Thompson made 23 saves in the game before leaving the ice midway through the third period for an apparent lower-body injury.
“He’s moving around, but we’ll get an MRI in the morning,” Cassidy said of Thompson. “We’ll have a much better idea and hopefully we get good news. I mean, we’ve been injured at every position this year, so it almost feels like, hopefully, this is a quick one, but I don’t know until tomorrow.”
Adin Hill made four saves in relief.
Kirill Kaprizov was the lone striker for the Wild, his second period power play goal came after the Knights had taken a 2-0 lead.
“We can’t be happy with our efforts here, but you’ve got to turn it around as quick as possible,” Wild captain Jared Spurgeon said. “We have a great opportunity here, with the homestand, to get rolling again. We can’t be pouting, there’s a lot of hockey left.
“We’re not playing our best, and it definitely isn’t our best hockey when we’re losing games like this, where we’re making mistakes we weren’t making earlier when we were winning games. We’ve got to get back to that.”
Vegas took a 1-0 lead in the first period on a strike from Nicolas Roy, Alex Pietrangelo pushed the lead to 2-0 in the second period.
Vegas’ Paul Cotter made the score 3-1 in the second.
“The last month, it seems like we haven’t been taking advantage of [opponent’s mistakes], and we just kept on trying to grind and do the right things, and we’re starting to get rewarded,” Vegas forward Reilly Smith said. “So, we’ve just got to keep that positivity going and the work ethic and hopefully we can keep on building too.”
Smith scored off a penalty shot in the second period for a 4-1 lead.
“You want to try and separate yourself,” Vegas’ Jack Eichel said. “They get that power-play goal, and you just want to work to get that next goal, and I thought we did a good job doing that. You want to play with a lead. You don’t want to sit back and let them get back in the game. I thought we pressed to get the next goal, and we were able to get a few.”
Eichel closed out the scoring the middle frame for the 5-1 final.
Marc-Andre Fleury made 18 saves before getting the hook in the second intermission.
“There’s no blame for Marc-Andre Fleury, and his teammates said that in between the second and third period,” Wild coach Dean Evason said. “Exactly that. Everybody knows what happened.”
Filip Gustavsson made eight saves in a mop up role.
“We had a good second half of the first and the [power play] was big getting us back in the game,” Fleury said. “They just kept coming and getting some goals, and that was it.”
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