Vegas Opens the Stanley Cup Finals with a Win Over Florida

The final series of the Stanley Cup opened with a match, a fairly solid score which does not quite accurately reflect the essence of what happened. In fact, the Vegas Golden Knights won 5-2 at home against the Florida Panthers in a hard-fought game, conceding first, and not least thanks to a miraculous save in a hopeless situation by goaltender Edin Hill.

With the main figure and the main picture of the match, which started the Stanley Cup final, everything was simple, no alternatives. The number is, of course, nine.

For the ninth time in the current play-off, Vegas has demonstrated, apparently, one of its most important properties. The property that holds the most important place in the set that has allowed the club to soar so high. Before the final, he had already accustomed to the fact that he calmly digests situations when the opponent leads. Many teams get nervous and make mistakes when they fall behind, but Vegas is definitely not one of them. For him, someone else’s leadership is complete nonsense.

“Florida”, by the way, in this match opened the scoring by no means from scratch. It actually started well for her. So good that it could have felt like she was much better prepared for him. Russian goalkeeper Sergei Bobrovsky tightly, effortlessly took difficult throws. In mobility and activity, the guests were not inferior to the hosts. And Vegas, having earned the majority, suddenly dug into the Florida zone and ran into a counterattack, in which striker Eric Staal showed amazing agility for a 39-year-old man, who supported the counterattack and rolled the puck into the net after a turn behind the gate.

The impact seems to be strong. But he had no effect. “Vegas” did not twitch and even before the break, the balance was restored, again finding themselves with an extra player on the court.

The picture is, of course, an episode from the second period. On the scoreboard – a draw, what such a game will lead to is not clear. And here, “Florida” succeeds in just the perfect combination. Brandon Montour passes the puck to free Matthew Tkachuk to the right. And Tkachuk, instead of firing on the move, finds an even more beautiful and at the same time practical solution. He, seeing that goalkeeper Edin Hill is moving towards him, immediately passes to the center, to the goalkeeper’s line. And there his partner Nick Cousins ​​has already taken the bridgehead.

This is the salvation of Hill, who somehow managed, almost contrary to the laws of nature, inexorably pulling him away from the point where Cousins ​​was about to celebrate the goal in a moment, to guess what to do and put a stick under the puck, then they rewarded him with every possible epithets – “incredible”, “impossible”, “fantastic”. And Vegas coach Bruce Cassidy said that the save is one of those that “flips” the game.

Although, strictly speaking, there was no directly obvious, eye-catching turn: Florida, after Hill’s feat, at least did not look like a team in a state of shock. But in any case, if this magical rescue of Hill did not happen, it would certainly be much more difficult for Vegas to deal with the enemy.

However, at the same time, it cannot be said that, having been inspired by the goalkeeper’s miracles, he coped easily. The final score is a typical optical illusion hiding reality. And it consisted in the fact that in the second twenty minutes the teams exchanged goals (Florida, in front of the siren, seemed terribly encouraging for her), and in the final guests looked extremely cheerful for some time. Looking at how annoyingly they press, it was impossible to assume that the match would end in a major defeat for them.

Everything really decided the nuances. Vegas took the lead again, thanks in large part to the trademark stubbornness of their Russian forward Ivan Barbashev. Barbashov had a great moment, but he ran into everything that Bobrovsky had calculated. The striker, however, did not stop, won the puck and threw it back – to defender Zach Whitecloud. And the throw of the latter reached the goal, since Bobrovsky was blocked from seeing.

Soon, another Vegas striker, Mark Stone, flashed skill and perseverance. Matthew Tkachuk tried to gently throw the puck out of the zone, so that his own would get it, and Stone managed to intercept it on the fly, about a meter above the ice – and immediately shoot without a chance for Bobrovsky. Florida had hoped that the video replay would confirm their version of high-sticking, but no, they did not. And Reilly Smith scored the fifth goal already into an empty net: the guests in the end, of course, removed Bobrovsky for the sake of the sixth field player in a futile attempt to escape from defeat, which, presumably, did not really clarify the alignment in the series. Still, Florida, despite the misfire, did not look like a 100% outsider.

Alexey Dospekhov