GAME DAY: Golden Knights host Wild in afternoon tilt

The Golden Knights look to improve on the Western Conference’s best home record when they host the Minnesota Wild on Monday afternoon at T-Mobile Arena.

Opening faceoff is 3 p.m., and the game will be televised on AT&T SportsNet Rocky Mountain.

The Knights are 16-4-3 at home and ranked first in the conference by points percentage (.761), ahead of Winnipeg (.760) and San Jose (.760).

“They’re a good team. You look at their lineup, they’ve got real good depth. So it should be a good battle,” coach Gerard Gallant said. “Obviously, they’re hungry. They’re fighting for those — it’s too early to say wild-card spots yet — but they’re in the mix with a bunch of teams there, so I think it’s going to be a good battle. We’ve got two games left before the break and we want to finish strong at home.”

Jonathan Marchessault ended a scoring slump with three goals in Saturday’s 7-3 victory over Pittsburgh. He had one goal in his previous 11 games and four points since Dec. 17 prior to recording his second career hat trick.

Marchessault leads the Knights with 17 goals.

“I think it’s a matter of how we show up and what happened (Saturday), it happened and it’s over with and we need to focus on (Monday),” Marchessault said. “They have a lot of skills. They’ve been good for a lot of years and we’ve got to be ready for them.”

William Karlsson halted a streak of eight straight games without a point when he recorded a goal and an assist against the Penguins.

The Knights (29-17-4, 62 points) defeated Minnesota 2-1 in a shootout Oct. 6 in the second game of the season after going 0-3 against the Wild last season.

Minnesota (24-21-3, 51 points) sits one point out of the wild card after defeating Columbus 2-1 on Saturday.

The Wild went through a recent shake-up, acquiring forwards Victor Rask and Pontus Aberg in separate trades. They each assisted on Zach Parise’s winner against the Blue Jackets.

Parise leads Minnesota with 20 goals and 42 points in 47 games. Jason Zucker, the first Nevada-raised player in NHL history, has 13 goals and 11 assists in 47 games.

The Wild are 6-4 in their past 10 and have lost two straight on the road.

Minnesota ranks tied for 26th overall in goals per game at 2.75.

“We played a great game in Minnesota. I liked the way we played,” Gallant said. “Last year they gave us a lot of trouble, for whatever reason. They were one of the two teams we didn’t beat the whole season. The first game this year I thought we played great. We worked hard against them and we’ll see what we’ve got (Monday).”

Golden Knights projected lineup

Forwards

Jonathan Marchessault-William Karlsson-Brandon Pirri

Max Pacioretty-Paul Stastny-Alex Tuch

Oscar Lindberg-Cody Eakin-Ryan Carpenter

Tomas Nosek-Pierre-Edouard Bellemare-Ryan Reaves

Defensemen

Brayden McNabb-Nate Schmidt

Shea Theodore-Deryk Engelland

Nick Holden-Colin Miller

Goaltender

Marc-Andre Fleury