With a 9-3 home victory over the Florida Panthers in Game 5 of the Stanley Cup finals Tuesday night, the Vegas Golden Knights became the fastest team to win a title in the NHL’s modern history.
“I can’t even describe the feelings in my stomach right now,” Stone said after carrying the Stanley Cup around the ice at Las Vegas’s T-Mobile Arena. “Everything you could imagine. The grind of an 82-game season, four playoff rounds — you grind and you grind and you grind, and at the end of the day, to be the last team left standing, it’s incredible.”
After the Panthers cut a two-goal deficit to one early in the second period, the Golden Knights blew the game open with four unanswered tallies before the period ended, including a goal by Michael Amadio with just 1.2 seconds left that gave them a commanding 6-1 lead.
At that point, all that was effectively left for fans roaring “We want the Cup!” was to spend the final period celebrating the imminent granting of their wish.
Vegas’s Ivan Barbashev kept the party going with a third-period tally and Hill, who didn’t take over as the Golden Knights’ primary goaltender until Game 3 of the second-round series against the Edmonton Oilers, threw in a few more sterling saves before giving up late goals to Florida’s Sam Reinhart and Sam Bennett.
Still in a desperate situation, Florida pulled goalie Sergei Bobrovsky with more than 6½ minutes to go, allowing Stone to send his third goal into an empty net after tallies in each of the first two periods, including one with his team shorthanded. The game was delayed for a few minutes as hats rained down on the ice, and when it resumed, Bobrovsky was back in net. Vegas’s Nicolas Roy then beat the Florida netminder with 1:02 left to create the final margin.
Nicolas Hague, Alec Martinez and Reilly Smith also scored for Vegas. Aaron Ekblad had the second-period goal for Florida, which got a shaky performance from Bobrovsky (23 saves).
Already facing an uphill challenge on the road against a favored opponent, Florida was playing without forward Matthew Tkachuk, its leading postseason scorer who was sidelined Tuesday with an initially undisclosed injury. Florida Coach Paul Maurice said after the game that Tkachuk fractured his sternum in Game 3 and played through it in Game 4 before it proved too much Tuesday. Maurice added that three additional players had broken bones.
The Knights won the Stanley Cup in just their sixth year of existence after they shockingly reached the finals as a first-year expansion franchise in 2018, losing then to the Washington Capitals.
On the ice Tuesday for Vegas were six original members of the team added before that 2017-18 season, including key forwards Marchessault and Smith, who went from the Panthers to the Knights as part of an expansion-draft deal that earned Vegas praise for some savvy maneuvering. High-profile moves in subsequent years brought in Stone, Eichel and defenseman Alex Pietrangelo.
“I think this is what everyone dreams of, but you come to an organization like this and the expectation is to win this thing,” said Eichel, the second pick in the 2015 draft who endured six losing seasons with the Buffalo Sabres before he was dealt in 2021 to a Vegas organization that had reached at least the conference semifinals in three of its first four seasons. “It’s a special place to play, and I just can’t give everyone enough credit for putting us in this position. The guys in this room, it’s just the most unselfish group in the world, and it’s pretty good to do this with them.”
In taking a mere six seasons to win it all, the Knights topped a mark held by the Philadelphia Flyers, whose 1974 Cup win came seven years after they were part of the six-team 1967 expansion that doubled the size of the NHL and began its modern era. The Oilers took just five seasons to get a championship after joining the NHL in 1979, but they had already existed for several years in the defunct WHA. The 1979-80 New York Islanders won the first of the franchise’s four straight Cups in the eighth year of its existence.
In other major U.S. sports leagues, the 1970-71 Milwaukee Bucks won a title in their third season in the then-17-team NBA, and the Arizona Diamondbacks won the 2001 World Series in their fourth season.
The Panthers are still in search of their first Cup triumph after falling short in the finals for the second time. Their first trip came in 1996, just two years after Florida played its inaugural campaign as a 1993 expansion club.
With the Game 5 loss, the Panthers drew another notable parallel — this time an unhappy one — with the Miami Heat, their neighbor approximately 35 miles to the south. As with the Heat, Florida entered the playoffs as the lowest seed in the Eastern Conference, only to immediately knock off the top seed and make a stunning dash to the championship round. Miami’s Cinderella run also ended this week in five games; it lost one day earlier to the Denver Nuggets, who like the Golden Knights were the No. 1 seed in the West.
After the Stanley Cup was brought onto the ice Tuesday, Stone was the first to jubilantly hoist it before it was handed to Smith and then Marchessault.
“The look in my teammates’ eyes when I got it — one of the craziest feelings I’ve ever had,” Stone said of getting ahold of the Cup. “To know that I’m doing it with my 25 to 30 best friends makes it that much more special.”