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The Minnesota Wild may have entered their first-round series against the Vegas Golden Knights as heavy underdogs, but they looked like anything but on Tuesday night. Led by a dominant performance from the top line of Kirill Kaprizov, Matt Boldy and Joel Eriksson Ek, the Wild took home-ice advantage back with a convincing 5-2, Game 2 victory at T-Mobile Arena.
Kaprizov led the way with two goals and an assist in the win, while Boldy scored the opener and added an assist. The line spent most of their evening in Vegas' zone, giving the Knights' blue line all it could handle and then some.
“I think Ecky, Bowls and Kirill, they play a playoff-style type of hockey,” Wild head coach John Hynes said afterwards, per NHL.com's Paul Delos Santos. “They play north. They play direct. They can use their competitive level in combination with skill. It gives them a chance to be a line that's hard to play.
“That's what makes those guys good. When you're highly talented guys like those guys are and they're committed to play the game that's required to win, then they're able to be big impacts.”
Along with 30 saves from Filip Gustavsson, Minnesota just looked like the better team for most of the night. Boldy took a terrific feed from Kaprizov to open the scoring midway through the first period, and the Wild put two more past Knights goaltender Adin Hill before the end of the frame.
Kaprizov made it 4-0 early in the second, and that was more than the team would need for their first playoff win in two years.
“From a competitive level, we were where we needed to be,” Hynes continued, per Santos. “But the big part is boys under pressure, playing smart, understanding how to manage those certain things, and I thought we did a fairly good job of that tonight. They had some strong pushes, and we got some timely saves when we needed them.”
Wild a transformed team with Kaprizov, Eriksson Ek healthy
The Wild just look like a completely different team when fully healthy; Kaprizov missed 41 games during the 2024-25 regular-season, while Eriksson Ek was out for 36.
Those two along with Boldy were put together in Minnesota's second-last game of the campaign, and won't be getting split up anytime soon. The trio have created a monster on the top line, one that the Golden Knights had no answer for on Tuesday night.
“They're just unpredictable,” Vegas defenseman Noah Hanifin told reporters. “They're real creative. They're high-skill players. We've got to be better on them and harder on them because they drive all the offense.”
If the Knights can't slow down the top line, and Gustavsson continues playing well between the pipes, there's a real chance the Wild could complete the upset and win their first Stanley Cup Playoff series since 2014-15.
But there's still a lot of work to do, and the Knights should be much more energized when the series shifts to the State of Hockey for Games 3 and 4 later this week.
Game 3 is set for Thursday night at Xcel Energy Center; puck is set to drop just past 9:30 p.m. ET.
