2023 Stanley Cup Final: 4 Takeaways from Golden Knights-Panthers Game 4

The Vegas Golden Knights are win away from reaching the peak of the NHL’s mountain.

Thanks to a 3-2 win in Game 4 of the Stanley Cup Final on Saturday night, the Golden Knights were able to take a commanding 3-1 series lead as it shifts back to Las Vegas on Tuesday night.

That creates the possibility for Vegas to win their first championship and potentially do so on home ice.

What a scene that is going to be.

Vegas jumped out to a 3-0 lead in Game 4 and looked like it was going to cruise to an easy win. But the Panthers started to claw their way back into the game with a late second-period goal and seemed to steal momentum away when captain Aleksander Barkov made it a one-goal game in the third period.

Florida had a 6-on-4 power play with a chance to tie the game late in regulation, but was unable to beat Golden Knights goalie Adin Hill.

Now they are back into a familiar position that they have been facing for much of the season: Playing in a must-win game.

The Panthers have faced plenty of adversity this season, going on a late regular-season run just to get into the playoffs and then overcoming a 3-1 series deficit in the First Round against a record-setting Boston Bruins team.

They need to do it all one more time.

Now let’s dig into some takeaways from the Golden Knights’ Game 4 win.

From the moment they entered the NHL, the Golden Knights have built their roster through blockbuster moves.

From the coaching staff, to the roster, to the method in which it has all been constructed.

Big trades, big free agent signings, big names.

But one of the most significant moves they have made over the past few years was one that probably slid under the radar when it happened. That was the trade for Chandler Stephenson when they acquired him from the Washington Capitals for a fifth-round draft pick in December 2019.

At the time, Stephenson was a 25-year-old role player that had not really shown much offensive punch or the ability to be an impact player.

His career has done a complete 180 in Vegas and that continued on Saturday night with two more goals in the Game 4 win. That gives him 10 goals this postseason.

Going back to December 2, 2019, the day he was acquired from Washington, his 186 regular season points are second-most on the Golden Knights, trailing only Jonathan Marchessault’s 197. It has turned out to be one of the biggest steal trades in the NHL over the past four years and is one of the moves that has helped put Vegas on the threshold of a championship.

Along with the offense, he has also been one of Vegas’ most reliable centers in the face-off circle.

Every championship team needs stars at the top of the lineup. And Vegas has always had that.

But they also need to make the right moves around the edges and on the margins to help complement those stars. Stephenson has helped them accomplish that and is playing a huge role in a potential championship run.

Finding players like Stephenson has also helped Vegas build an incredibly deep roster that has been a matchup problem for the Panthers in this series.

That has also been a major deciding factor.

After Saturday’s game, the Golden Knights have already had 11 different players score at least one goal in the first four games of the series, including four (Stephenson, Marchessault, Mark Stone and Brett Howden) that have already scored two goals each.

By comparison, Florida has only had seven different goal-scorers and only two (Matthew Tkachuk and Brandon Montour) that have scored more than one goal.

That’s significant because no matter how good your top-tier players are, they’re not always going to carry your offense. There are going to be stretches where the puck is not going in the net for them. When that happens, you need to have players that are capable of picking up that slack and making an impact of their own.

In Vegas’ case, it has been a relatively quiet series for its top-star, Jack Eichel.

He has briefly left two different games due to injury and while he has five assists in the series, he has yet to score a goal. That has extended his current goal drought to 11 games. That sort of thing tends to happen to every player at some point. But when the rest of the players around them are scoring goals and producing wins, we tend to forget about those droughts.

That is where Vegas is excelling.

It simply has so many players that can beat you on any given night. If Eichel isn’t scoring goals, Mark Stone is there. If Stone gets shut down, Marchessault and Reilly Smith are able to pick up the slack. If it is not them, it is Chandler Stephenson or William Karlsson.

Vegas not only has the stars to make the team a contender, but it also has the complementary pieces that can make it a champion.

They are all clicking on all cylinders right now in this series.

Hill was another Golden Knights acquisition that slid under the radar when it was made but is proving to be a difference-maker.

He only ended up in Vegas to begin with because Robin Lehner was lost for the season back in August and even then he was just supposed to be additional depth and a backup option.

He did not even open this postseason as Vegas’ starting goalie.

But with Logan Thompson sidelined and Laurent Brossoit injured during the series against the Oilers, Hill got his opportunity and has completely run with it, in one of the most surprising postseason goaltending performances in recent memory.

He was outstanding again in the Golden Knights’ Game 4 win and helped slam the door shut in the closing seconds as the Panthers desperately tried to tie the game and the series.

His win on Saturday was already his 10th of the playoffs and makes him the first goalie in NHL history to win 10 games in a single postseason after not playing a single game in the first round.

It is not like he is just along for the ride, either. While Vegas’ defense has played exceptionally well, Hill has a whopping .934 save percentage that is far away better than anything he has ever done in his career.

Prior to this season, he had shown flashes of being a league-average (or better) goalie in a backup role, but he had never really had an opportunity to shine as a starter in either Arizona or San Jose. If he is able to finish the job and get one more win, it could have a major impact on his career beyond this season.

He’ll be entering the unrestricted free-agent market this summer, in a very weak goaltender class and has a pretty strong argument for why he should get a big-money contract from a team with a desperate need in goal.

Goaltending is the ultimate X-factor in the NHL, especially in the playoffs. You don’t always know where it’s going to come from or who is going to provide it.

Hill is the perfect example of that.

Even though the Panthers ended up making Saturday’s game close and had an opportunity to tie the game late in the third period, it’s not a winning formula to go down by three goals by the middle of the second period.

The Panthers have been a great story this postseason, going from a No. 8 seed to the Stanley Cup Final, but Vegas has looked like the superior team for the majority of this series.

The Golden Knights’ scoring depth has been better. Their defense has been better. Their goalie has been better.

That has produced a 3-1 series lead and a 17-9 goals advantage for Vegas through the first four games. It would take a pretty dramatic swing for the Panthers to turn this around and get back into the series.

But this isn’t exactly foreign territory for this Panthers team.

For whatever flaws they might have and for as overwhelmed and overmatched as they have looked at times during this series, this is still a heck of a hockey team. It was a Presidents’ Trophy-winning team a year ago and it has shown this season that it is more than capable of making up ground and coming back when everybody has already given up on them.

They did that during the regular season when they looked to be completely cooked in the playoff race with more than a month to go and they did that in the First Round when they overcame a 3-1 deficit against a record-setting Boston Bruins team.

It might require Matthew Tkachuk going on another heater offensively and Sergei Bobrovsky recapturing his magic from earlier in the playoffs, but both players have proven they are capable of doing that. They have three more games to figure it out.