LAS VEGAS — People travel from across the globe to visit the Las Vegas Strip for its dramatic showmanship.
They come to see the daring acrobatics of Cirque du Soleil, the comedy of Blue Man Group or the dramatic illusions of David Copperfield. On Tuesday night, though, the most dramatic show in town was at T-Mobile Arena, where the Vegas Golden Knights pulled out a thrilling 3-2 overtime playoff win over the Minnesota Wild.
Before Brett Howden scored in overtime, a double goal review in the final minute of regulation put the players, coaches and sold-out crowd on an emotional roller coaster.
It began with a scoring chance by Minnesota forward Ryan Hartman in transition. He and teammate Gustav Nyquist raced into the Vegas zone, and Hartman drove strongly to the net front. Vegas goaltender Adin Hill poked the puck off of Hartman’s stick, but it bounced off Hartman’s leg and into the Vegas net.
Wild players celebrated in jubilation. Vegas players hung their heads in dismay. It appeared Minnesota had taken a 3-2 lead with only 75 seconds remaining in the game.
Officials huddled and eventually decided the league would review the play to determine if the puck was kicked into the net. Seconds later, they announced that it was ruled a good goal, sending the Wild bench into yet another celebration.
However, on the Vegas bench, coach Bruce Cassidy had already spoken with video coach Dave Rogowski and called the officials over to initiate yet another video review. Cassidy challenged that Minnesota was offside before the goal.
Minutes later, referee T. J. Luxmore turned on his mic at center ice and announced the goal would not count due to Nyquist being offside at the blue line. It was a matter of inches, as Nyquist’s skate blades crossed into the Vegas zone just ahead of the puck.
“It was a great pick up by him and it saved our ass,” Cassidy said following the overtime win.
Ryan Hartman’s potential game-winner comes off the board after a successful Vegas offside challenge#mnwild | #VegasBorn pic.twitter.com/LBBTxfdaQJ
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The overturned goal, followed by Vegas’ overtime winner, was a series-swinging sequence of epic proportions. If Hartman’s goal had counted, the Wild would’ve been seconds away from taking a 3-2 series lead back home. Instead, the Golden Knights head to St. Paul with an opportunity to close the series.
Asked about the swing of emotions, Vegas forward William Karlsson said, “Basically from depressed to sheer joy.”
The teams that win Game 5 in a 2-2 series in the Stanley Cup playoffs have gone on to win the series 79 percent of the time. While Rogowski — like most NHL video coaches — didn’t address the media following the series-changing challenge, Cassidy offered great insight into his process and how it all went down behind the scenes.
Following the goal, Cassidy and his staff were looking down at the iPads on the bench while Rogowski quickly reviewed the tape from his spot in the coaches’ room behind the team dressing room on the arena’s event level.
The review to determine whether or not the puck was kicked into the net gave them some extra time.
“So now (Rogowski) is looking at, is there goaltender interference?” Cassidy explained. “He works through that, then goes back to the offside. You always go back to the entry. Always. That’s just how they do their job, to make sure every entry is clean.”
Before the officials had announced the results of the first review, Rogowski had already suggested Cassidy challenge for offside.
“He shows me one angle and it’s like, ‘Yup, you should challenge,’” Cassidy recalled. “He (usually) gives us a recommendation percentage-wise. There’s a minute left in the game, so you’re probably going to challenge no matter how close it is, unless it’s blatantly onside.”
In this case, with less than two minutes left in the game, the reward for winning the challenge far outweighed any risk of losing it. Still, Rogowski was certain.
“He just told me he believed it was offside 100 percent,” Cassidy said.
Rogowski has served as Vegas’ video coach for the last five seasons, joining the club in January 2021 from the AHL’s Chicago Wolves. He began his coaching career in the NCAA as a volunteer video coach for the University of Denver in 2014. After three years at the collegiate level, he was director of hockey operations for the USHL’s Chicago Steel for one year before joining the Wolves in 2018.
At the time, Chicago was the Golden Knights’ AHL affiliate. In 2021, Vegas hired Rogowski as its video coach.
“He does a great job for us, I’ve said it all along,” Cassidy said. “He’s got a good eye for that. He has a routine and knows what he has to look for, so he does that constantly, but he does have a good eye for it.”
The Golden Knights have won 17 challenges since 2021 while losing only five. They have an even better record on offside challenges, going 11-2 during that span. Cassidy explained further that Rogowski’s record could be even better.
“He hasn’t got very many wrong that he wanted to challenge,” Cassidy said. “I think we challenged one late in the year that was my call to protect the goaltender, in Vancouver, maybe.”
Cassidy said Rogowski watches every review around the NHL and catalogues the results in a book. That way, when a specific scenario comes up, he can quickly review how the league has handled it in the past.
“If you see enough of one kind of goalie interference, he might say typically this one doesn’t come back,” Cassidy said. “So he’s got a good feel for that.”
Each challenge is ultimately Cassidy’s call. Rogowski likes to give each play a percentage chance of being overturned by his estimation.
“He’s good under pressure,” Cassidy said. “I’ll use the other night (as an example). We’re in Minnesota and it’s 3-2 us, and they score. (Minnesota forward Kirill) Kaprizov is clearly into our goalie, so everyone on the bench is like, ‘You gotta challenge!’
“He didn’t recommend challenging that the other night. He said it was probably 50-50. Now, we’ll never know, but we tried to snoop around on that and I get the feeling maybe it wasn’t going to go our way if I sort of read between the lines, talking to different people. So good for him. He didn’t want to go off of emotion and say they were into our goalie.”
On Tuesday night, the back-to-back reviews of the same goal created an awkward situation for Rogowski that he and Cassidy laughed about afterward. Because he’s alone in the coaches’ room, sequestered from the action on the ice, he misunderstood the first review announcement.
“The interesting part for him was because he’s in the room, he thought the offside challenge was when they announced it was a good goal,” Cassidy explained. “So he’s like, ‘Aw man.’ I felt bad for him in that moment.”
It turned out Rogowski was right, and his team took advantage of the break to pull within a win of the second round of the playoffs.
“It was a great challenge by Dave at a critical point in the game,” captain Mark Stone said. “He saw it right away and gets the challenge. Once we got into the locker room, we felt comfortable. I thought we regrouped pretty well. I thought we had a great start to overtime.”
Vegas’ fourth line delivered the victory four minutes into overtime when Tanner Pearson dug the puck off the boards behind the Minnesota net and found Howden alone in front. Howden fired the shot into the top corner of the net, just out of the reach of Wild goalie Marc-Andre Fleury, and T-Mobile Arena erupted.
“When you get a call like that, you have to take advantage,” Pearson said. “Everyone here has pretty much won it (the Stanley Cup) before, so it’s definitely easier when it comes to those situations. Everyone knows what’s at stake.”
(Photo: Ethan Miller / Getty Images)
