Golden Knights Stanley Cup Chances Increase After Player Heads to LTIR

The Vegas Golden Knights have been dealing with cap troubles since October, but they might’ve just found their golden solution.

The Vegas Golden Knights are coming off a bad loss to pacific divisional rivals, the Calgary Flames. In a loss that was just terrible on all accounts, there was some even worse news that came out prior to the game.

Multiple sources were told by personnel in the Golden Knights organization that Mark Stone was going to miss the game with an upper-body injury. The same upper-body injury that has been nagging at Stone since the start of the season.

Stone has missed multiple games due to this injury, and according to multiple reports that Vegas Golden Knights will be looking to move him to the LTIR.  Which, if that is in fact true, that would give the Knights enough cap relief to activate Jack Eichel.

Eichel, who I’m sure is itching to get back on the ice in-game, isn’t that far away from making his long awaited Vegas Golden Knights debut. I’m not going to get to deep into that here, but if you want to read about it, I wrote about it here.

Anyways, getting back on track, Mark Stone could be heading to the LTIR. He’s tried playing through this injury since the start of the season, but I think the organization knows that he needs time off to heal and recover. As we get closer to the playoffs and into the playoffs, we’ll need him healthy.

Stone, being the captain of a team like the Knights, is going to have to be healthy and ready to play come playoff time. The Knights have a good combination of youth and veteran leadership, but with Stone’s leadership and ability to play on all special teams units and 5v5 he’s too important to this team.

However, if the Vegas Golden Knights can find a way to ease Mark Stone back into the scheme of things as the playoffs get closer, then the Knights can wait until the off-season before worrying about the cap space. Which, is truly a God-given gift.

This, at the end of the day, is a business which makes things hard. You don’t want to trade people away to a different team that you know personally. I mean, sometimes you have to do things you don’t want to- but you have too. Being able to wait until the off-season will give the Knights front office awhile to figure out their plan for addressing these concerns.