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Brace yourselves, folks: Mark Stone is, in fact, in the playoff Game 1 lineup for Vegas, two months after lacerating his spleen … and a month and a half after his placement on LTIR opened the door for the Golden Knights to go big at the trade deadline and pick up Noah Hanifin, Anthony Mantha and, most consequential of all, Tomas Hertl.
He isn’t the only injured Golden Knight making a return, either. Joining Stone is top defenceman Alex Pietrangelo.
“Obviously, I would like to play 82 games. I think I’ve played not even 100 in the last three years, it sucks,” Stone told the media Monday. “We’re here, we’re healthy, we’re looking to put our best foot forward.”
The fact Stone has been injured and put on LTIR just before the trade deadline three years in a row has led to criticism from the outside about possible cap circumvention, charges GM Kelly McCrimmon has called “ridiculous.”
In 2022, Stone was put on LTIR with a back injury on Feb. 9, and activated on April 12. However, the Golden Knights missed the playoffs that season and Stone did return to the lineup for the final nine regular season games.
Then, last season, Stone was sidelined with what was described as an “upper-body” injury on Jan. 13, and then placed on LTIR on Feb. 1. It was another back injury that ended his regular season, though Stone was ready to go against Winnipeg in Game 1 of the playoffs and logged 21:28 of ice time. The Golden Knights were able to acquire Ivan Barbashev at the trade deadline as their big acquisition.
It’s well maintained that the league tracks these injuries, and that by the rule of the book Vegas is doing no wrong here. Teams are legally allowed to use their LTIR space to fill in for injured players. And, yes, about half the NHL was “over the cap” and using some of their LTIR pool by the end of the season. This is not a unique situation to this season, either.
But for Vegas, this is a convenient pattern people on the outside are pointing to and questioning the legitimacy of, especially when Stone has been able to return on time for the playoffs two years in a row.
“I think, last year, it had a more distinct timeline; this year, I wasn’t super confident I’d be standing here today ready to go,” Stone said. “Timeline was a lot longer. I had some people telling me it was eight weeks, some people telling me it was six months. It was just a wait-and-see, see how the scans go.
“I think, last week, the last scan I did it felt like I was moving in the right direction, getting close to playing, and the last scan confirmed it. Now, I’m ready to go.”
And so now we have the defending champions, marred by injuries to a variety of players all season, getting key contributors back as they take on the top-seed Dallas Stars from the bottom of the Western Conference bracket.
As calls for change to this rule erupted after Vegas’ exciting deadline day, one of the proposed ideas was to ensure that any playoff lineup dressed be under the salary cap, since that is not currently enforced in the post-season. So, we wondered, what would the Golden Knights’ Game 1 lineup look like against the Stars?
According to Jesse Granger at The Athletic, these were Vegas’ lines at Monday’s pre-game skate:
Barbashev—Eichel—Marchessault
Stephenson—Hertl—Stone
Howden—Karlsson—Mantha
Carrier—Roy—Kolesar
Hanifin—Pietrangelo
McNabb—Theodore
Hague—Whitecloud
In net, Logan Thompson will start, while Adin Hill will be the back up.
If you add up the AAVs of all 20 of these active players, Vegas’ Game 1 cap hit would be $84.247 million — or roughly around $750,000 over the salary cap.
So, if that were the rule, the Golden Knights would have to get a little more creative shaving a couple dollars off their starting lineup. This also does not include Alec Martinez’s $5.25 million, the second-highest cap hit among all Golden Knights blue-liners this season.
Now, it should be pointed out that Vegas isn’t the only team that theoretically could ice a lineup with a cap hit over the upper limit. For example, if the Toronto Maple Leafs swapped Nick Robertson for William Nylander, and Simon Benoit for T.J. Brodie after Game 1, that lineup would account for $85.768 million against the cap — or over a million more than Vegas’ commitment.
They’re also not the first team to be in this spot, and maybe not even the most egregious. Remember just a couple years ago, Nikita Kucherov famously sported an “$18 million over the cap” T-shirt after Tampa won the Stanley Cup that made light of its roster bloated by LTIR. Kucherov missed the entire regular season in 2020-21, but returned for Game 1 of the playoffs and went on to lead the league in post-season scoring.
Debates on how to change this rule, or whether to change it at all, will surely rage on and be remembered at trade deadline 2025. But this rule is here to stay, under the current CBA, at least.
“If everyone in the league, including the players, the teams and the league, wants to change this, they’ll do it in two years,” Sportsnet’s Elliotte Friedman explained on The Jeff Marek Show. “We’re going to find out in the next 24 months how people really feel about this.”
The bottom line is that Vegas has Stone back for Game 1, but there’s a question about how effective he can be coming off a lacerated spleen. Last year, Stone’s first game back in the playoffs, he was held pointless and was a minus-3, then followed up with two goals and an assist in Game 2. This year, he hasn’t played in about two months and while he’s very familiar with one of his linemates — Chandler Stephenson — he’ll play with (ironically) Hertl for the first time.
“Watched a lot of his game, played a lot against him,” Stone said. “Sure seems like a guy that fits my game pretty well. I think they’re trying to put me in a comfortable position.
“Been a lot of hard work to try and get here today. Feel healthy, feel ready, scans look great, doctors feel confident in me playing, so I’m going to play.”
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