Golden Knights save best for last in series-clinching win

The plan was to match the desperation and intensity, to treat a 3-1 lead in the best-of-seven series as if trailing by such a margin. To act like the other guys were playing better hockey.

“Obviously, they’re going to give everything they have,” Golden Knights center Nicolas Roy said of the game plan beforehand. “We don’t want to take our foot off the gas. We want to keep pushing. The last one is always the toughest to get.”

Yeah. Not so much.

The Knights eliminated the Jets in the Stanley Cup playoffs with a 4-1 victory before 18,476 on Thursday night at T-Mobile Arena.

It wasn’t that close. The Knights’ best players were far ahead of those from their opponent.

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The victory means the Knights advance to meet the winner of the Oilers-Kings series.

Either team will present different issues than the Jets, but know this: So, too, will the Knights of Thursday. They were about as good as you could expect in such a moment, whether they lost some of their dominance late or not.

They played without two of their top defensemen in Shea Theodore and Brayden McNabb and still controlled the entire pace.

Winnipeg looked from the outset like a side ready for a long summer vacation, like a side that was nearly three hours early for a handshake line.

“Our mindset shouldn’t change,” Knights coach Bruce Cassidy said about how his team needed to approach the close-out game. “I think what happens is you might have one team look ahead. It’s human nature, right? Or there’s all this conversation about being up. The other team made the playoffs for a reason, and they’re desperate.

“They’re going to have all the energy they can muster. Here we are. All I know is that you have to caution your team that it’s not easy. We don’t want to pretend it is.”

Here’s the thing: It wasn’t Winnipeg with the most energy.

And the Knights made it look easy.

And they were the more focused side.

And they just might have played their finest game of the season in their biggest game of the season.

Played one of their best defensively without two regular blue liners.

They can go far executing like this. With this sort of goaltending from Laurent Brossoit, who was terrific against his former team. They can make some real noise as the No. 1 seed.

Interesting night, this. Cassidy chose to insert William Carrier, out since March 3 with a lower body injury, back into the lineup. He replaced Phil Kessel, which made all sorts of news because Kessel hadn’t missed a game since November 2009. Not one. For any reason.

But it also showed that Cassidy, no mater how well his team played lately, never stopped searching to get better. No matter who he had to disappoint.

Shows that it’s only about making his team the absolute best it can be.

Mission accomplished

“You hope you make the right call at the end of the day,” Cassidy said when asked if Carrier would play Thursday. “We’ve had pockets of good and not so good. If you can put a player in there who can help you reach your ceiling, you do that. And whoever the person is coming out has to feel good about what they’ve done … It doesn’t matter if you’re up 3-1.”

It didn’t matter that Carrier played just fine — he had some big hits. It did that Cassidy made the switch.

That he didn’t think twice about such a move.

You want your coach that decisive. You want him always looking to improve the product.

And such was as good as he could have hoped. The Knights just got better as the series moved along, kept separating themselves from an inferior team.

The goal was to match the desperation and intensity.

Mission accomplished.

Ed Graney is a Sigma Delta Chi Award winner for sports column writing and be reached at egraney@reviewjournal.com. He can be heard on “The Press Box,” ESPN Radio 100.9 FM and 1100 AM, from 7 to 10 a.m. Monday through Friday. Follow @edgraney on Twitter.