Knights need to get best players going

LAS VEGAS — Someone suggested to me Friday morning that I go look for Jack Eichel. And while I was at it, see if I could locate Mark Stone. Because they don’t appear to be in St. Paul, Minn., with the rest of the Vegas Golden Knights.

I checked at the store to see if either was on the side of a milk carton. Nope. Not there. I considered calling the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police and ask them to do a wellness check. But there have more pressing concerns at the moment. And sending a search party in the Twin Cities wasn’t a viable alternative either, especially since there’s already people out trying to find where the Minnesota Twins’ bats have disappeared to.

But somebody better find these guys before it’s too late. We’re getting perilously close to where the Golden Knights are going to find themselves on the wrong side of the handshake line and the Minnesota Wild will be moving on to the next round.

The Wild are up in the best-of-seven series 2-1 heading into Saturday’s Game 4 at the Xcel Energy Center in St. Paul. A win by Vegas changes everything and it becomes a best-of-three event with two of the games at T-Mobile Arena.

However, for that to happen, a number of things need to occur. At the top of the list is Eichel, he of the 94-point campaign during the regular season, and Stone, who had 67 points in 66 games, need to be found and resuscitate their games.

Yes, it would help for goaltender Adin Hill to get back on the beam, for the defense to collectively improve their play in front of whoever is in net and to score more than two goals a game. But in the playoffs, your best players have to be your best players. That comes from Bruce Cassidy, not me.

So far in three games, Eichel and Stone have been kept off the scoresheet. They are a combined minus-10, which means they’ve each been on the ice for five Minnesota goals while being outplayed by the Wild’s top line of Kirill Kaprizov, Matt Boldy and Joel Eriksson Ek.

Frankly, it hasn’t been close. And that’s the series in a nutshell. If that narrative doesn’t change quickly, you can kiss the playoffs and all that talk of returning to the Stanley Cup Final adios.

If you’re Cassidy, you don’t have a ton of options at this point. He tried shaking up the line earlier in the series by replacing Ivan Barbashev with Brett Howden. He could try and separate Eichel and Stone in hoping to get them going. He doesn’t have the luxury of having the last change and he has tried avoiding playing Eichel against Kaprizov, Boldy and Ericsson Ek to little or no avail.

Perhaps he really shakes things up and puts Tanner Pearson, a two-time Stanley Cup winner, in the lineup and sit Victor Olofsson. Maybe Akira Schmid starts Game 4 instead of Hill after Schmid subbed for him in the third period in Game 3 and didn’t get scored upon in nine shots. Perhaps he does the unthinkable and sits Shea Theodore, who is minus-6 in the series, in favor of Ben Hutton or Kaedan Korczak.

Yes, it may smack of desperation and it might backfire on Cassidy should he do any of the above. But he knows his guys better than anyone and I don’t see him standing passively by as his team is being outworked and outplayed by Minnesota from the goal crease out.

And let’s call it for what it is. The Wild are not your average wild card team. If it had been relatively healthy this season, chances are it would be playing Dallas or Colorado instead of the Knights.

There’s no question the Knights are in a battle, one they ultimately may lose. Yes, teams have come back from 3-1 deficits in the past to advance in the playoffs. But it would behoove Vegas to find a way to win Game 4, get the series back to even then try and take two of the three remaining games. That’s a lot less daunting than trying to win three in a row where there’s no wiggle room in the event you falter.

But for that to happen, it means having their best players show up to save the day while avoid having to chase the game, something that’s becoming commonplace in this series.

A lot has changed since the series began last Sunday. The Knights started well but the ice has tilted on them. They are talented enough to turn it around. Will they? We’ll find out in the next 24 hours.