Vegas GM responds to allegations of cheating the salary cap

At this year's trade deadline, the Vegas Golden Knights made a massive impact with the trades to acquire Anthony Mantha, Noah Hanifin, and Tomas Hertl. This is only possible to do because of their significant salary with Mark Stone and Robin Lehner currently on LTIR. This allows Vegas to be significant over the salary cap in the playoffs, which has caused some outrage from fans across the league. Yesterday, Vegas GM Kelly McCrimmon emphatically denied any wrongdoing in their use of salary.

For the last few years, Vegas has been able to take advantage of some (fortunately timed) injuries, and each year it's Mark Stone that's on LTIR. For the last three years, Stone had been placed on LTIR in Februrary and then activated just before the playoffs.



Vegas is clearly taking advantage of every rule within the NHL they can to ice the best roster possible in the playoffs, but repeatedly placing one player on injured reserve to do so is not a great look on Vegas or the league. According to a recent report from Elliotte Friedman, the NHL is going to begin looking into modifications of the rule, so that injured players can't return for game 1 of the playoffs.


Perhaps a suspension or buffer period would be implemented, where a team would miss a player for a game or two, which would be a significant disadvantage in the playoffs. The next time the Collective Bargaining Agreement is up, this will certainly be a hot topic of discussion for GMs and Owners around the NHL.