Only six years after becoming the NHL’s 31st franchise, the Vegas Golden Knights have captured the Stanley Cup in five games against the stalwart Florida Panthers, winning their first championship on home ice in a 9-3 blowout victory.

After Game 1, 2 and 4 victories, and only conceding a single defeat to Florida in Game 3 in overtime, Game 5 was all Vegas from the opening whistle, jumping out to a 2-0 first period lead after a shorthanded opener from Mark Stone and a follow-up from Nicolas Hague. An additional pair from Stone, marking the first Cup clinching hat-trick in a century, along with tallies from Alec Martinez, Reilly Smith, Michael Amadio, Ivan Barbashev and Nicolas Roy, paired with a 31 save performance from Adin Hill, led the Knights to the win, the most lopsided Cup clincher since Pittsburgh’s 8-0 thrashing of Minnesota in 1991.

The win marks Vegas’ first Stanley Cup in their second final, making the finals as a surprising Western Conference champion in their first season, falling to Washington in five games. The Golden Knights saw seventeen IHLC champions from five countries (Canada, Latvia, Russia, Sweden and the United States) on the roster hoist the Cup, including captain Stone, Conn Smythe winner Jonathan Marchessault, and Hill, the third-string goaltender who backstopped Vegas with a .932 save percentage in these playoffs.

With the victory, four players now add a Stanley Cup to their World Championship Gold, leaving them one Olympic Gold Medal away from joining the Triple Gold Club – Canada’s 2016 World Champions featured Stone and Ben Hutton and Assistant Coach Misha Donskov, while Hill captured Gold with Canada in 2021, and William Karlsson won with Sweden in 2017; coaches Sean Burke (1997) and Donskov (2016) also captured Gold with Canada.

Our congratulations go out to the players, management and fans of the Vegas Golden Knights, with those on the roster that have also held the IHLC highlighted in bold:

Photo Credit: NHL – IIHF – HHOF – IOC