LAS VEGAS – Down to their ninth life, the Florida Panthers will throw everything they can at the Vegas Golden Knights in Game 5, and that includes a little mind trickery.
Head coach Paul Maurice knows the status of his MVP, Matthew Tkachuk, for Tuesday’s elimination date. He’s just not sharing it.
If Florida has a reasonable hope at pulling off an improbable comeback, with the Stanley Cup in the building here on out, Tkachuk must play — and play well.
He leads the club in goals (11), assists (13), points (24), plus/minus (+12), power-play points (nine) and penalty minutes (74) and averages 21:37 in ice time during these playoffs.
The Cats lack snarl and scoring with him out or ailing, as the winger has been since taking a hard check to the shoulder from Keegan Kolesar in Game 3.
If Tkachuk does play?
“There would be no limit at the start of the game. But that would be true of any player that I put in,” Maurice said.
The coach is asking his group to summon as much energy as possible into a straightforward plan of attack.
“There’s this simplicity for the coach, too. I don’t have to manage minutes for the next game. Barky’s (Aleksander Barkov) not playing 14 minutes tonight,” Maurice said Tuesday morning.
“Mentally unencumbered by the weight of the situation. Just relaxed and as hard and as fast as you can. So, you’ve got to line up any advantages that you have going into a game like this, and one of those is that singularity of focus. And then make sure you harness the energy in that.
“There’s nothing to save it for.”
Florida will lean on the fact that it has already rallied from a 3-1 series deficit, against the Presidents’ Trophy–winning Boston Bruins in Round 1.
Only one team in NHL history has accomplished such a rally in the Stanley Cup Final, and that was 81 years ago (1942 Maple Leafs over Detroit).
“I just remember Game 5 in Boston. We were just playing free. To be honest, we were playing with no fear. No fear of making mistakes. Playing like there’s no tomorrow. And that’s probably the same mentality,” Anthony Duclair said.
“Give everything we’ve got. And obviously the first period is gonna be really huge… lot of emotions on both sides.”
Flip the pressure
Panthers forward Eric Staal has the unique experience of having lived in Vegas’s shoes.
Staal’s 2006 Carolina Hurricanes led the Edmonton Oilers 3-1 in the Cup Final with a chance to close out the series at home in five.
Those Canes lost the fifth game 4-3 in overtime, then got shut out 4-0 in Game 6. They did finish the task in Game 7 but not without some white-knuckle days.
“For me personally, I’ve been on the other side of it. Stanley Cup Final, we’re up 3-1. It’s not easy,” Staal recalls, attempting to flip the stress onto Tuesday’s favourites.
“There’s some pressure there. There’s a lot of variables that go along with it. Family, friends, the Cup is in the building. Your mind can wander. For us, it’s just about winning [Tuesday] night and enjoying the game and playing as hard as we can and get the W, and then taking it back home.
“Use that stress-slash-pressure on them to our advantage and be excited.”
Knights coach Bruce Cassidy, too, knows the pain of losing a Cup-clincher on home ice. The former Bruins coach holds memories of his 2019 Game 7 loss at TD Garden to Alex Pietrangelo’s Blues vivid.
“There’s going to be a lot of people in their ear when you’re one game away about different things. Maybe you take a day and enjoy that or deal with that. When we get back on the ice,” Cassidy said, “it’s time to get back to work and back business. Our group’s been very good at that. Very good. They understand what’s at stake.
“If it means discussing certain things with family members about the Stanley Cup or whatever you want to talk about, then I think that’s OK. That’s what we’re playing for. I don’t think there’s any taboos with that. You can’t bring that to the rink.
“It’s not done until you get to 16.”
Coaches got jokes
Maurice believes he has one of the funniest coaching staffs going.
“And we’re old. So, we tell jokes that only we get, and then we laugh at the players that wouldn’t get those jokes. So, laughter is a big part of what we do,” Maurice said.
Long-serving goaltending coach Rob Tallas is the Panthers’ practical joker. He pasted the face of one of his peers on a milk carton with a caption — Have you seen this person? —because that coach left the rink early.
“We’re stupid. And that’s a big part of it. We spend so much time together. We do. We all get to the rink very, very early. Because our wives don’t like us. And they’re right. And then we stay long hours,” Maurice said.
When Maurice was hired over the summer, he walked into the coaches’ quarters and noticed all eight staffers had their own office separated by partitions. Not very team-like.
So, they pulled all the walls down and instead placed a giant table in the middle of the main room. Maurice maintains his own office adjacent, but he can’t stay put there.
“It’s funny. I can’t sit in my office, right? I gotta come out,” Maurice explained.
“By the time you get into coaching long enough… it truly is the joy of being around each other. That’s what we find relaxing. So, we spend breakfast together every morning, waiting for somebody to say something silly, and then he gets jumped for it the rest of the day. You know, it’s a nice place. Players have a team, and they get to keep that. But coaches have a team too.”
Maurice’s detailed answer was in response to a question by CBS Miami reporter Samantha Rivera, who went viral this series with a clip of her pushing a fan out of frame during a live on-camera report.
“Great straight-arm, by the way.,” Maurice dead-panned. “You’ve got a future as a penalty killer.”
Knights in three?
It seemed wildly optimistic of Golden Knights owner Bill Foley when he said, upon the birth of his expansion franchise, that his goal was to win a Stanley Cup in six years. That quote has been dusted off now that his Knights, the second-youngest franchise in the NHL, are on the verge in Year 6 of winning the Cup.
But winger Reilly Smith, one of six original Knights still on the team, revealed on the eve of Game 5 that the team actually missed the owner’s revised schedule for winning.
“After we lost in the finals after the first year, Bill said: ‘OK, now Stanley Cup in three,’” Reilly said. “I don’t know if that got published. But we felt like we’ve had the team every year to push and challenge for the Stanley Cup. We’re still there today. Obviously, we’re in a better spot now. We’ve played a great playoff so far, and we just have to keep that mindset. We know the formula to win games, and we have to stick to that.”
Since entering the NHL in 2017, losing the Stanley Cup Final in five games to the Washington Capitals in 2018, only the Tampa Bay Lightning have played and won more playoff games than the Knights, who are 53-34 in the post-season and have made it to four conference finals and two Cup finals in their six seasons.
Canada’s team
Canada’s winless streak in the Stanley Cup hit 30 years when the Edmonton Oilers and Toronto Maple Leafs lost in the second round of this spring’s tournament. But the Vegas roster is as Canadian as any.
Fifteen of 20 players in the Knights’ lineup are from Canada.
The lineup includes four players from Ontario (Smith, Michael Amadio, Alex Pietrangelo and Nicolas Hague); three from Quebec (Jonathan Marchessault, Will Carrier and Nicolas Roy); three from Manitoba (Mark Stone, Kolesar and Zach Whitecloud); two from Saskatchewan (Chandler Stephenson and Brayden McNabb); two from British Columbia (Shea Theodore and Adin Hill); and Albertan Brett Howden.
Stone said the Western Canadian component is no accident; Knights general manager Kelly McCrimmon coached and managed the WHL’s Brandon Wheat Kings, a team he owns, before joining Vegas.
Scattered among the Canadian super-majority are Americans Jack Eichel, Alec Martinez and Jonathan Quick, Swede William Karlsson, and Russian Ivan Barbashev.
Florida’s lineup includes a dozen Canadians.
