Welcome in to the DNVR Avalanche podcast. We got Jesse, Rudo, and AJ coming to you live on a Monday.

Let's just come out and ask it. Do they have the Vegas Golden Knights just been cheating this whole time? Is that how you guys feel about it?

It's not, but it's a funny way to praise it.

They've just been cheating this whole time.

Cheat-hole cheaters.

Look, I don't think they've been cheating, but I've seen a lot of people feel that way about it.

So I'm going to tell a small little roundabout story about a conversation AJ and I had this weekend where we were talking about it.

Yeah. AJ called me and I laughed my ass off because he goes, we got on the phone and he's like, dude, this weather, this rain is just like really pissing me on. And I was like, bro, I know. And we kind of went on this like five minute little diatri about how shitty the weather has been recently. And he goes, all right, well, I didn't actually I didn't actually call you to talk about the weather, but I figured if I could find a sympathetic ear anywhere, it's probably here. So we did that. We talked a little bit about work stuff. And then we just started talking about the Mark Stone LTIR thing. And here was something that was brought to my attention. Because honestly, I was way over it. It was kind of a, who cares, good for Vegas. That was a really good team. Yeah. They were fun to watch. Their final performance, I thought, was special. They played great for those five games. That was fun to watch. Yeah. But I told AJ over the weekend that I, I hadn't brought to my attention. and I hadn't really thought about the fact that this last season, I believe, was three consecutive years where the roster that Vegas finished the season with was not regular season cap compliant.

The thing to me is it's not like it was a little bit not compliant. It's way over. Right.

Yeah. Right. And it wouldn't have been like the Avs roster last year where it might have eeked like 400K over.

They're like six million dollars over. It's like it's not even close. And it just it really did make me stop and pause and just think about the, I made

the mention last week like, oh, aggressive ownership, aggressive management, good for them.

They're positioned to be in a good spot for a while.

We mentioned they're fine going around rules and exploiting loopholes.

But I don't know, there is something about the fact that it was,

like, even Tampa, it was one year, you can write it off as the anomaly of the shortened season.

Yeah, it would not have been possible in an 82 game season. Right, right. To go three straight seasons where you're getting around the cap like this,

that starts to feel gross at a certain thing.

Also, like, keep in mind,

this isn't a super duper new thing.

Chicago did this with Patrick Kane a good while ago.

This has been going on for a while.

...