Mark Stone Scored A Hat Trick In Game 5 Of The Stanley Cup Final With A Broken Wrist
If you built the quintessential hockey player in a lab, he'd look a helluva lot like Mark Stone. He may not be the fastest skater on the ice at all times. He may not have the sickest mitts out there. But when you put everything together and add an oversized heart and some oversized nuts? Mark Stone is your guy.
He's a former 6th round draft pick who went on to be a 2x Selke finalist, just led the Vegas Golden Knights to their first Stanley Cup championship, and was just the 4th player in the past 30 years to score a hat trick in the Stanley Cup Final. But upon further review, I'd imagine he's the first to ever do it with a goddamn broken wrist.
As Herb Brooks would say, a broken wrist is a helluva long way from the heart. As long as you're able to load Mark Stone up with as many pain meds as possible between periods, there's not a chance in hell he's missing the rest of that game. Especially not when he's got a few more goals to bury before starting the celebrations.
First off, the fact that this goal came after the wrist injury is a solid testament for modern medicine. Second off, it's a good thing Vegas was beating the shit out of Florida in game 5 there. We already knew about Matthew Tkachuk playing in game 4 with a broken sternum. But once the adrenaline of that game wore off, he couldn't go for game 5.
I'm sure Mark Stone would have found a way to go in game 6 with a broken wrist if he needed to, but it's gotta be so much easier to celebrate winning the Cup with a broken wrist than still battling for it. Guy must have been so liquored up for the next week of celebrating that he didn't even know he had wrists to begin with.
You want a hockey player? Mark Stone is a hockey player. That's why you give a guy like that 9.5 sheet per year and slap a 'C' on his sweater. The man is nails.