Mark Stone made his indelible imprint on the NHL and the Stanley Cup when he lifted his team and the hallowed trophy in the late spring of 2023. The franchise’s most important person then and now.
GMs manage and coaches coach. Critical roles for sure. But in the end it’s the players that play and win or lose. And Mark Stone, captain of the Vegas Golden Knights, is a mix of leadership, talent, emotion and drive. The 32-year-old remains an elite player but there’s so much more to Stone than what happens between whistles.
Stone sets the course, the attitude and the mindset. If Jack Eichel is the mainsail, Stone is the boom. If Alex Pietrangelo is the chassis, Stone is the transmission. Vegas can find speed and power throughout the lineup but it is Stone who knows when to give gas, downshift or change position on the track. He’s the captain, the emotional weathervane and one helluva winger.
From back surgeries to a lacerated spleen, Stone has missed a lot of hockey the last few seasons but managed to squeeze in a Stanley Cup and 121 points over 136 regular season games.
Vegas missed the post-season in the spring of 2022 and both fans and media around the hockey world pegged Stone and his teammates as washed up.
A defiant Stone stated prior to the next season he had no time for the words and opinions of others. He believed in his group and was happy to go about proving their mettle one game at a time. When he carried the Stanley Cup into his team’s dressing room after raising it in front of the planet – he screamed at his teammates, “We’re the best bleeping hockey team in the world!”
Last spring’s Game 7 loss to the Dallas Stars and first round exit was disappointing but also provided the silver lining of a lengthy off-season. For a franchise which has played more playoff hockey in the last seven seasons than any team but the Tampa Bay Lightning the rest and recovery was welcome. Perhaps more so for the captain than any of his teammates.
Gary Lawless: The training camp before you won the Stanley Cup, you had missed the playoffs the year before, and there was a lot of talk about the Golden Knights being washed up. And I interviewed you at that time, and you were pretty blunt about how you felt about what people were saying and what you felt about your team. You lost in the first-round last year, in Game 7, to a really good Dallas team. What's your mood in terms of do you think you guys will be a little hungrier this year after what happened last year?
Mark Stone: Yeah, definitely two different situations. I think last year we could have gone on a long run. The year before, I think it was a blessing in disguise to miss the playoffs. Everybody regrouped after all the wear and tear. It was good to get our ducks in a row there. But this year, I feel like we still are building on a substantial resume we've had for the last couple years. I still feel like we have built a very good foundation to have new players come in. Obviously, the rosters have had some turnover. It is an unfortunate part of the business. You can't keep everybody and pay everybody. It's difficult to see friends and teammates go. But we're adding some new hungry players who are excited to come to Vegas to play with our team. I think I was a little bit more emotional as I was younger. As I'm older I have realized that people are going to put a bullseye on our back because they want to see us fail. We haven't failed too much in our history. People want to see the Golden Knights crash and burn. But like I said, I think the foundation we built doesn't really allow for that to happen. So, I'm feeling confident. I think the team is excited to get back. We definitely have that chip on our shoulder. A lot of people in our industry don't believe that we can get back to the team that we know we are, but time will tell. We still believe that we're one of the teams that is going to training camp with the chance to win the Stanley Cup.
GL: You are going to get this question for a while, probably forever. You’ve had a couple back surgeries, and then last year, the spleen injury, I'm of the opinion that this team can't win without you. You're the most important player here. How do you feel?
MS: I feel good. I was feeling great last year too. I was having one of the better statistical years of my career too until I had that freak accident. I’m feeling good and energized after an unfortunate long summer. I am excited to get back playing. People think I'm lying when I say I expect to play 82 games every year. Unfortunately, I’ve had some tough injuries that I've had to deal with along the way, but I think that just builds the adversity of what our team has gone through over the last number of years. I’m really excited to get the group back together, practicing again, and start to build from the ground up. Starting day one, adding onto an already strong foundation.
GL: You go into training camp with Jack Eichel, William Karlsson, Tomas Hertl, and Nicolas Roy as your centermen, and a blue line that includes Alex Pietrangelo, Noah Hanifin, Shea Theodore, Brayden McNabb and we can go on and on. Management went and got Ilya Samsonov to join Adin Hill. That’s a really good tandem. The expression is always that you build from up the middle, from the goaltender out. You know your goaltender, your D and then your centermen. You guys are as good as anybody else in the NHL.
MS: What do you need to win? You need defense, you need to have great centermen, and you need to have good goaltending. Well, that's what I don't understand. I'm not sure why people are writing us off, because we’ve got all four top end centers at their position, and six or maybe eight defense deep. We have a goalie who has proven that he can win the Stanley Cup as a starting goalie. We have another goalie who's proven to be of starting goalie caliber for the majority of his career. I think he should be excited to play in front of the defense that we have. We have good, complimentary wingers, I don't see that being too big of an issue. When you have four incredible centers, and you can move those guys around, all those guys can play the wing at times if need be. But we added some younger players who are looking to break through in the league. We added Victor Olofsson who's looking to kind of resurge in the league. I do think that we're pretty strong at the positions you need to be strong at.
GL: How’s your summer been?
MS: Pretty low key, to be honest. I went to a couple weddings, spent some down time. It's been a fun couple of months to be able to see my daughter kind of grow into a little person for the first time last year. You didn’t see the personality yet, but now it's really starting to show so it's been fun. That is the only way to put it. I've really enjoyed that part of it, because once training camp comes, you don't get to do it as much. I've really enjoyed the last couple of months. I got to go home during the Olympics last week to see my dad and my brother and his family. So that was awesome. I'm getting excited to get back. You always know when it's time and it feels like time.
GL: Do you have any interest in playing for Canada at the 4 Nations Face-off?
MS: It's one of those things, right? I would never, ever turn down something like that. It's a goal of mine to make that team. I want to be on that team. I'd love to be able to have two top years for me personally to be able to play for Canada in 2025, and 2026, could be a dream come true. To get to play with the best players in the world. I would absolutely love it and welcome it. It would be one of the top things that I've ever been able to do in my career. But if it doesn't happen, it doesn't happen, and I'll use the rest to focus on the Vegas Golden Knights. I'd be lying if I said I wasn't super interested and super determined to try and make that team.
GL: To discuss what happened in the playoffs last year, it looked like you and Hertl you needed just a little bit more time back in the lineup. Dallas was a good opponent. It wasn’t just you and Hertl. There were a lot of guys that were just coming back off an injury. What do you think would have happened if you beat Dallas?
MS: It’s tough to say. What shoulda, coulda, woulda, but, you know, I'm confident in every series we go into. I believe that it's very hard to beat us four out of seven games. That'll always be my opinion. Which leads me to believe that we have a chance to win the Stanley Cup every season, right? So, it was hard for Dallas to beat us four out of seven. They had to go seven. It was unfortunate. It came down a fluky bounce, going off (Alec Martinez) Marty’s skate perfectly in the corner, or else we could have been moving on and but that's hockey. Maybe we got those breaks the previous year. But like I said, I'll always feel confident going into a series knowing that a team has to beat us four out of seven, because I believe that's a tall task. It's just the confidence I have in our team.
GL: What do you like about training camp?
MS: That's a good question, because obviously everybody speaks about difficult training camps, but I do enjoy the enthusiasm of younger players coming to their first training camp. I guess you could use the word inspiring. I just remember being the same as these kids and being super excited to be on the ice at the NHL level. The exhibition games you are trying to make them feel as close to a regular season game as possible. A lot of these kids are going back to junior hockey and they want to get the experience. You try to make them feel as comfortable as you can. The first day of training camp as I am walking in, I am 32 years old now and I still feel like I’m 23 coming to my first training camp in the NHL and I am super excited to be there. Getting to see the staff and all the players. It’s an organized chaos but you can really accomplish a lot and set the precedent moving forward into the season of what kind of team you want to be. We are going to have new players coming into training camp this year who are going to be on our team, and they need to know how we are doing things and the standards we apply.
GL: You have played a little bit with (Pavel) Dorofeyev and he looks like he might be on the cusp of really big things. Are you excited about him?
MS: I am. He has gotten better each year and each day. He just seems like a guy who has steadily improved with every passing day. I think he has the talent that not many guys have. Not a lot of guys can shoot the puck like he can, not many guys can take pucks to the net like he can. He is just going to learn the league more. He is going to find areas to score. He compliments his linemates really well. Not everybody does that. There are guys who don’t make it easy on their linemates to play off. He is not one of those guys. When he's on the ice he wins pucks for you. He’s undercover with how he works the walls at a high level. He is going to be a key guy for us.
