The Daily Faceoff Show: Are the Vegas Golden Knights still gaming the system with LTIR?

The Vegas Golden Knights had a wild set of transactions on Tuesday.

They placed three different players on Long-Term Injured Reserve, bring their total LTIR number up to seven players, which gave them the cap space necessary to activate captain Mark Stone.

On Wednesday’s episode of The Daily Faceoff Show, Matt Larkin and Scott Burnside discussed if there’s anything wrong with what the Golden Knights are doing…

Matt Larkin: The Golden Knights are playing their LTIR games. They bring back Mark Stone after a 26-game absence and they conveniently placed some other bodies on the Long-Term Injured Reserve…

Here we have Mark Stone activated before the playoffs, so 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?

Scott Burnside: It’s not exploiting, assuming those players are actually injured. And you have to wonder, with 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.

You have to trust that the NHL is looking at this closely, and if these players aren’t injured, the NHL would move in. It isn’t shady to me, but it’s something that I’m sure doesn’t sit well with those teams who are competing with Vegas for playoff spots, especially when those playoff spots are worth literally millions of dollars.

You can watch the full episode here…