It’s not saying the injury is fraudulent it’s manipulating the recovery time. Stone could have been back before game one of the play offs. But if he come back then the Knights would not have been able to sign Hannafin, Hertl or Mantha. Those are some major pieces that you add to a team including a 10 mill $$ player in Stone. If the intent is to replace a player who has had a significant injury with an equal quality player then that is fine but the intent of the rule isn’t to be able to double up on those two players by making them both available for the play offs. That’s ridiculous.

On your second point a significant number of cup winners have been teams who have gamed the LTIR rule with high dollar players. Knights and Stone, Tampa has used Kuch a couple times on LTIR to win cups, I believe the blackhawks did it with a cup win or two. That is the problem, it puts these teams at an unfair advantage over teams who couldn’t take advantage of LTIR.

Dallas has to play a healthy stacked Knights team who purposefully lost their last game to get their desired matchup (avoiding the Oilers) as a WC team. No one believes the knights, with a healthy pieterangelo and Stone along with a LTIR benefitted load up of Hertl and Hannafin is an underdog to any western conference team