Golden Knights caught breaking the rules?!

On Tuesday night, Golden Knights captain Mark Stone returned to action in Vegas’ 5-4 loss against the Vancouver Canucks after being out since Feb. 8 with a back injury. But in order to make his return happened, the Golden Knights had to make several moves to respect the ceiling cap. Vegas moved William Carrier, Nolan Patrick and Laurent Brossoit all to the long-term injured reserve (LTIR) prior to last night’s game, opening an additional $4.925 million in cap space. That gave the team $9.93 million in usable cap space, which is enough to activate Stone, and his $9.5 million cap hit in time to face the Canucks.

However, the guys at Daily Face-off started arguing that the Golden Knights might cheating with the LITR moves that cannot be compared to what the Tampa Bay Lightning did last spring with Nikita Kucherov. This is what Matt Larkin and Scott Burnside wondered as they discussed if there’s anything wrong with what the Golden Knights are doing…

“This isn’t a perfect Nikita Kucherov situation, in which he’s parachuting in just in time for the playoffs, but there is some manipulation going on here by the Golden Knights, with these players that are all suddenly hurt just in time for Stone to come back.

Do you see this as a new evolution of the Tampa Bay villainy? Is this getting shady?” asked Larkin.

“It’s not exploiting, assuming those players are actually injured. And you have to wonder, is management in Los Angeles, Dallas, Nashville, all of the teams fighting for one of those couple of playoff spots, how do they feel about this move? You have to trust that the NHL does what it always says it does in these situations, which is to watch very closely what the medical issues are that surround these players that were conveniently put on the LTIR. To me, it’s the timing that brings up the issue for people, it’s a natural reaction because the convenience to get Mark Stone back in the lineup can’t be ignored,” answered Burnside.

You have to admit there is something shady about this… The Golden Knights are desperately fighting for a playoff spot, probably the last Wild Card slot available, and they need every help up front as they can…

Can they make it happen or will the NHL see that what they’re doing is wrong?