Knights’ cap tactics would taint Cup repeat
Ever since it became clear the Vegas Golden Knights were again using NHL salary-cap loopholes to enhance their Stanley Cup defence, some have argued this really is all a tempest in a teapot.
That continued after Game 1 of their opening-round Stanley Cup playoff series against the Dallas Stars, won by the Golden Knights. While critics have hammered the NHL for allowing Vegas to add several key — and expensive — players before the trade deadline by exploiting Mark Stone’s injury absence for a second straight year, it was argued that their playoff roster wasn’t actually that much over the league cap.
When the salaries of all the Vegas players used in the opener were totalled up, the Knights were only about $750,000 (U.S.) over. So what’s the big deal?
Well, that narrative certainly changed in Game 2.
With defenceman Nic Hague injured, Vegas was able to insert veteran Alec Martinez. Hague’s cap hit is about $2.294 million. Martinez’s, however, is $5.25 million.
So for that game, also won on the road by Vegas, the Golden Knights actually exceeded the cap by about $3.7 million. How nice for the champs. Also, how ironic for Martinez, unlikely to be a Golden Knight beyond these playoffs because Vegas probably won’t be able to fit him under the cap next season.
This is all theoretical, of course, because in Gary Bettman’s often illogical league the cap limits don’t apply in the playoffs. Most reasonable people think this stinks.
More to the point, if Vegas is able to repeat as Cup winner, it’s clear this will be a tainted repeat.
You can’t say Vegas cheated or Stone was faking. But by using the long-term injury absence of Stone to conveniently create the space necessary to acquire Noah Hanifin, Tomas Hertl and Anthony Mantha before the deadline and then miraculously declaring Stone fit to play in the playoff opener, the Knights have, for the second year, made the league’s administrators look like fools.
Dallas, a first-place team, looks like it will be the first to fall victim to the NHL’s unwillingness to proactively deal with this obvious problem. The Stars put together a terrific regular season to earn home-ice advantage in the post-season. Their reward was an opponent that was allowed to not only use Hanifin, Hertl and Mantha, but Stone as well.
Stone made a mockery of the entire business by scoring the first goal of the series. Hanifin added to the NHL’s embarrassment, and undoubtedly Dallas fury, by scoring the winning goal in Game 2.
In a season already marred by the ridiculous Pride tape ban and more recently the abrupt relocation of the Arizona Coyotes to Utah, this Vegas cap manipulation is the ugliest issue of all because it impacts the competitive integrity of the game.
NHL players work incredibly hard to have their names inscribed on the Cup. To have it tainted by a problem that could be easily addressed should be frustrating to each and every player.
As the Bettman administration has always done in similar situations, league officials insist all is well, and that they are carefully monitoring all injury situations including Stone’s to make sure everything is on the up and up. They’ve quietly told media folks that it’s not just up to them anyway, that this is a collective bargaining issue that will have to wait until there’s another contract to negotiate.
So you’re telling me the NHL Players’ Association would have no interest in immediately dealing with this gaping hole in the system to make sure all members are playing by the same rules? Has the league asked?
The solution is simple.
Any NHL playoff lineup should have to be cap compliant. So in this case, to bring in Martinez, the already overbudget Knights would have had to remove about $3.7 million worth of players — maybe Nicolas Roy ($3 million) and Keegan Kolesar ($1.4 million). Faced with those restrictions, Vegas might have gone out and acquired Hanifin, Hertl and Mantha anyway, knowing they would have to adjust in the playoffs. But at least they wouldn’t be allowed to double-dip.
Teams shouldn’t get an artificial advantage for the playoffs based on how cleverly they outfoxed the NHL cap cops. This problem was first brought to the league’s attention in 2015 when Chicago used the loophole with Patrick Kane, then again in 2021 when Tampa did the same with Nikita Kucherov.
This didn’t just become a problem this season. But Bettman, in the final laboured stages of his extended run as commissioner, ignored it.
Now we have the very real possibility of a tainted Stanley Cup repeat in the offing.