The Vegas Golden Knights are one loss from the end of their Stanley Cup Final, and the next game comes fast. After a 4-2 loss in Game 5 on Thursday, they headed into Game 6 trailing the Carolina Hurricanes 3-2 and needing a win on Sunday at 8 p.m. ET to keep their season alive.
That is why Jack Eichel is being searched now. He was on the No. 1 unit with Pavel Dorofeyev in Game 5, a move that helped Dorofeyev score twice after a seven-game scoring funk. The winger’s first goal came at 6:52 of the first period on the power play, and it briefly gave the Golden Knights a lift before the Hurricanes answered with two power-play goals by Andrei Svechnikov.
Dorofeyev’s night was the kind that should have changed the game on its own. He had a career-high 37 goals during the regular season, and John Tortorella said he had been a little quiet before rediscovering that touch. Tortorella also said putting him back with Jack seemed to work and that he wanted to keep pushing him in that direction. Instead, the Golden Knights still lost 4-2, which is what made the performance both useful and incomplete.
The result pushed the pressure onto the rest of the lineup, and William Karlsson made that problem larger when he left in the second period on Thursday while holding his left arm and wrist. On Friday morning, Tortorella said Karlsson was probably not going to be with the team, and that left the Golden Knights to consider how they would replace him if he could not play in Game 6. During the regular season, Mitch Marner had filled in at center for a chunk of the schedule while Karlsson was out with a lower-body injury, which gives the staff at least one familiar option to weigh over two days of preparation.
Tortorella ruled out one change that would have been easy to sell after the loss. He said he would not consider moving Carter Hart to Adin Hill for Game 6, even though Hart had allowed at least four goals in each of the first five games of the Stanley Cup Final. He also said one of the areas the team had lost a bit was special teams and that it was something they needed to look at after giving up two power-play goals. The Golden Knights do not have the luxury of sorting that out slowly now. They need one clean answer in a short window: hold the penalty kill together, find a way to cover Karlsson if he is out and make Game 6 look nothing like Game 5.
