Global Courant
LAS VEGAS –
From dazzling passes to Mark Stone’s hat-trick to grand goal celebrations, the Golden Knights gave their city a true Vegas-style celebration, capturing the fledgling organization’s first Stanley Cup with a 9-3 romp over the beaten and exhausted Florida Panthers on Tuesday night.
Coach Bruce Cassidy, in a nod to the Knights’ brief history, started five of the original Vegas players known as the Misfits and put the sixth on the second squad. Cassidy sounded confident the day before the game that his team would play well, and it certainly did, blowing open a one-goal game in the second period to lead 6-1.
Vegas closed out the series in five games to win the Cup in front of a frenzied franchise-record crowd of 19,058 at the T-Mobile Arena that drowned out the pregame introductions from forward Jonathan Marchessault and goaltender Adin Hill and cheered all the way through the final buzzer.
Stone’s hat trick—with the third in an empty net with 5:54 remaining—was the first in a Stanley Cup Final since Colorado’s Peter Forsberg in 1996, also against the Panthers.
The Knights got the rest of their score from Nic Hague, Alec Martinez, Reilly Smith, Michael Amadio, Ivan Barbashev and Nicolas Roy. Martinez’s goal in the second period came nine years to the day after he scored in double overtime in Game 5 to give the Los Angeles Kings the Cup.
Hill came through with another strong performance that has quickly established him as a Knights fan favorite, even earning “MVP! MVP!” chants in the third period. Jack Eichel, the eight-year-old pro who played in his first postseason, had three assists.
Aaron Ekblad, Sam Reinhart and Sam Bennett scored for Florida, and Sergei Bobrovsky was blown away by another tough performance against Vegas after taking Florida to the final. The lineup was missing Matthew Tkachuk, the king of the playoff winning shots, but never the same again after a crushing blow to the shoulder by Vegas’ Keegan Kolesar in Game 3.
The Knights have set the standard for what an expansion franchise should look like, winning the cup final in their first season and the playoffs in every year but one. Six players remain from the original 2017-18 team that lost to the Washington Capitals in five games in the Finals.
Those players watched the Capitals skate the Stanley Cup that night, and then they got a chance to do it the same Tuesday to fulfill owner Bill Foley’s quest to win the championship in its sixth year.
Creating such a high standard from the start, the Knights played with high hopes, but repeatedly fell short despite going four runs to at least the NHL semifinals – until Game 5 against the Panthers.
This is Las Vegas’ second pro title in nine months — the Aces won the WNBA championship in September — and continues the astonishing growth of a sports market largely confined to prizefights, UNLV track and field, NASCAR and a whole lot of golf before the Golden Knights took the city by storm. The Raiders started playing here in 2020, the Oakland Athletics seem to be headed for the desert, Las Vegas is hosting a Formula 1 race this year, and the Super Bowl will take place at Allegiant Stadium in February.
As for the Knights, their connection to Las Vegas was sealed since the October 1, 2017 shooting that took 60 lives. They played an integral role in helping the city heal, reaching out to the off-ice community and winning big on it.
Beating Florida justified the many moves Knights management made to reassemble the roster over the years. Stone, Eichel and Alex Pietrangelo are the most notable players Vegas has acquired to get to this point.
And Cassidy, who was hired a week after being fired by the Boston Bruins last year, proved to be the coach to get them there, seemingly pushing all the right buttons to help Vegas win the Western Conference’s top seed and then become the champion of the NHL.
The Knights also won the title with an unlikely goalkeeper in Hill, who was injured as the playoffs began. Laurent Brossoit was the starter until he went out with an injury in Game 3 of the second round against the Edmonton Oilers, when Hill got his chance.
