Think playoff savior Adin Hill came out of nowhere? You haven’t been paying attention
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Ryan S. Clark, NHL reporter
LAS VEGAS — Adin Hill has won eight games in the 2023 Stanley Cup playoffs after winning 16 games in the entire regular season. In the span of a year, he’s gone from playing for a lottery team to being three victories away from winning the Stanley Cup.
More people watch his games at T-Mobile Arena than the amount of residents who live in his hometown of Comox, British Columbia. He plays goalie in a city in which their initial exposure to that position was a future Hall of Famer who set the standard by which all followers have been judged — for a franchise that’s just six years old.
Oh, and he never had any previous Stanley Cup playoff experience until his first game a month ago.
Championship teams all have defining traits. And if this is the year the Vegas Golden Knights capture their first-ever Stanley Cup, among those traits is their ability to find answers to colossal problems.
Hill just happens to be one of those answers. But it’s not like what he’s doing is anything new; he’s been that way all season. He was one of the answers for the question of how the Golden Knights would fare in net once Robin Lehner had an offseason hip surgery that forced him to miss the regular season.
Even though Logan Thompson started the majority of the games, Hill worked in tandem with the rookie to provide Vegas with the goaltending to finish with the best record in the Western Conference. He was there when Thompson was hurt in February and again toward the end of the regular season.
He was that constant when Laurent Brossoit, who took over from Thompson, sustained an injury in the second round against the Edmonton Oilers. Hill won three of his next four starts to close out the Oilers. Hill played well enough to give the Golden Knights a chance to win every game of the Western Conference final against the Dallas Stars, a series they won in six games.
All of that is what made Hill’s accomplishments in the Golden Knights’ 5-2 victory against the Florida Panthers in Game 1 of the Stanley Cup Final even more monumental. Because it was more than just the Golden Knights taking a lead in the series.
Hill provided another reminder of what has made him one of the Golden Knights’ strongest performers this postseason.
“I mean, it’s unreal. It’s kind of per usual now at this point, him making those saves and kind of bailing us out,” Golden Knights defenseman Shea Theodore said after Game 1. “He’s had our back the second he stepped in, and we’ve been fortunate to help him on the other end.”
NICK COUSINS WAS right there. He found a spot in the coverage that allowed him to be at the net front by himself so he could be on the other end of a Matthew Tkachuk centering pass to give the Panthers what would have been a 2-1 lead.
Hill was leaning toward Tkachuk before contorting his body back toward Cousins to use every fiber and sinew of his right arm to extend his stick in a manner that allowed his paddle to stop the puck just inches from the goal line, keeping the game tied at 1-1 barely a minute into the second period.
“A Hill To Die On.” “King of the Hill.” “Hill The Thrill.” “The Save.”
Pick whatever catchy phrase you want. It amounts to Hill’s save becoming arguably the defining moment of Game 1, one of the defining moments of this year’s playoffs, and if the Golden Knights win the Cup, potentially one of the defining moments of an entire franchise.
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Adin Hill makes phenomenal stick save for the Golden Knights
Adin Hill makes a phenomenal stick save as the Golden Knights keep it even in the second period.
“We were talking about it in the room,” Golden Knights captain Mark Stone said. “That was an incredible save at a pretty important time in the game. He makes a huge save, [Alex Pietrangelo] makes an incredible defensive play right after to keep the puck out of the net, and then not long after [Shea] Theodore makes an incredible play to get us a lead.”
Brett Howden, Nicolas Roy and Zach Whitecloud were all on the bench when Hill made the save, and each of their recollections just adds to what made Hill and the stop itself even more massive for the Golden Knights.
Howden echoed what a number of players said about the save: It was the “a-ha” moment that forced the Golden Knights to confront the fact they needed to help out their netminder.
“I’ve seen it live, I saw a couple pictures of it after but to see how close it was? It was just inches away or even just [Cousins] raising the puck, it could have been in,” Howden said. “I thought it was going in and saw that it didn’t go in. I was in disbelief and then the play started coming back the other way. Right then, we kinda looked at each other and were like, ‘Alright. He’s doing everything he can. We gotta get going here.'”
You mean there were no four-letter words used at that moment?
“Uh, there probably were some words like that,” Howden smiled.
Roy had just come onto the Golden Knights bench and said he did not actually see Hill’s save when it happened. His first viewing of it was when he went back and watched on social media.
“I heard the guys stand up and cheer for Adin, but I didn’t see it until after the game,” Roy said. “It was a game-changer for sure.”
Whitecloud said everything about the moment — from Hill’s save to watching Pietrangelo clear the puck down to seeing the puck go in the air after Pietrangelo’s clearance — made him feel tense for the three or so seconds it took for everything to play out in real time.
“When you’re watching, you’re tense. When you’re out there, it’s easy because you’re not as tense,” Whitecloud explained. “When you are watching your friends and brothers out there battling — for me anyway — I get tense. I watch, almost like I am a fan! That sort of thing can turn a game. When you look at those breaks, you’re like, ‘That’s a break. That’s one we need.'”
So what did Hill, the individual who authored such a moment, have to say about everything?
“The save? It kind of played through on a little screen on a cross to Tkachuk on his [strong] side and I kinda flew across to the [strong side] and then I saw him throwing it backdoor and Cousins was there,” Hill said matter-of-factly. “I reached out with my stick and was able to track it and got a piece of it with my paddle. It felt good!”
SPEAK TO ANYONE who works for an NHL team’s in-game production staff. They’ll tell you about how everything is subject to change. Unless that subject is how the Golden Knights treat the goaltender when it comes time to do the starting lineup at T-Mobile Arena.
There have been games in which Golden Knights public address announcer Bruce Cusick can’t even be heard announcing a goalie’s name — because the applause along with the music drowns out his voice.
Plenty of teams show a graphic of the player in the starting lineup on the video board before cutting to a live feed of them on the ice as they’re being announced. But in Vegas, they have a camera that does a gradual close up on the goalies that both creates an imposing figure, while also underscoring the importance that being “the starting goalie for the Vegas Golden Knights” means something substantial to many people.
There will be a time when this particular piece of the Golden Knights’ dynamic changes. For now, Vegas is a market that lacks several decades of team history that fans talk about with reverence. Vegas has what it knows, and what the city knows is that anyone who wears that mask and those pads better come correct or not even come at all.
So much can be said about the impact Marc-Andre Fleury had on the franchise during his four seasons in Vegas. What Fleury did and how he did it is part of the foundation for why there is such a passion about who plays in net for the Golden Knights.
“Honestly, it’s a little bit of pressure but it’s also really exciting for these guys because you could hear it yesterday when they named him and how loud it was,” Roy said of Hill. “It’s been unreal. I think every goalie who comes through this organization has had a real good time. You look at Flower. I think he was basically almost a God here.”
Nobody can say for certain what Hill’s impact will be whenever he does move on from the Golden Knights — he’s a pending unrestricted free agent, by the way. During this playoff run, his popularity continues to surge. Hill didn’t just receive a loud ovation when the starting lineups were read before Game 1: Hill received the loudest ovation of anyone, and that includes fan favorites like William Carrier and an All-Star like Pietrangelo.
There are more subtle nods too, such as when he made a save in the first period and once the play was whistled dead, the Golden Knights’ in-game production staff made the conscious decision to play the theme song from “King of the Hill.”
So why is there so much love?
He’s always been there for the team this season. He has been the same person whether he was playing or sitting. He came through when others were injured. The performances that have allowed the Golden Knights to be three wins away from winning the title that has come to define their win-at-all-costs mentality.
All of this is why the majority of the 18,432 fans who were in attendance for Game 1 screamed his name while celebrating every save he made.
It’s also why with three more wins Hill could be more than just a Golden Knight. He has a chance to possibly be king in a city that desperately wants a crown.
“He’s competed, he’s been a great teammate, he works hard, he pays attention to the details, he wants to get better,” said Whitecloud, whose stall is next to Hill’s at the team’s practice facility in Summerlin, Nev. “You’ll play for a guy like that any day of the week.”
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Greg Wyshynski
Boston Bruins forward Morgan Geekie can finish a Rubik’s Cube in under a minute.
“I mean, right now I’d be pretty rusty,” he said. “I’m not insane, like those kids that you see on TV, but I’m pretty good at them.”
When Geekie was around 10 years old, a cousin taught him how to speed solve the puzzle. While some have never found a way to line up that mosaic of colors despite years of trying, Geekie said it’s doable once one cracks the code. One summer at their lake cottage, his cousin wrote down its patterns. Geekie spent two weeks memorizing them and working out solutions while fiddling with the cube.
“It’s basically just all algorithms. You just do the same moves all the time once you get the pieces in the right spot. Once you do that, I mean, it’s pretty cut and dry. Everything goes in order,” he said. “I haven’t really forgot. It’s just one of those things that once you know it, you know it.”
Perhaps Geekie just knows how to score goals now, too.
That’s the simplest rationalization for the 27-year-old’s unexpected transformation into one of the NHL’s premier goal scorers. Through 34 games, Geekie is second in the NHL with 24 goals, trailing only the dominant Nathan MacKinnon of the Colorado Avalanche (28). Going back to the start of last season, Geekie is tied for 11th in goals scored (57).
Geekie scored 33 goals in 2024-25, which is 16 more than his previous career high set two years ago with the Bruins. He shot 22%, which obliterated his previous career best of 13.1% set in 2023-24.
There’s always an offensive player whose unexpected scoring surge in one season makes him the consensus choice for regression the following season. Entering this season, that player was Geekie.
He was the first player listed on ESPN’s rundown of regression candidates, with the expectation that he would top out at 26 goals. Sports Illustrated did the same thing, writing that his “offensive numbers are set to dip next season.” Daily Faceoff wrote that Geekie’s shooting percentage was “a strong indication that his performance isn’t sustainable, at least at this level” for the Bruins.
Geekie gets it. He called the predictions “a fair statement” given that he was scoring less than 10 goals in a season with the Seattle Kraken just a few seasons ago.
“I see it all. It’s an easy cherry to pick to be like, ‘Obviously he’s shooting 22%, it’s going to go down.’ It didn’t bother me at all,” Geekie said.
Rather than regress, Geekie has progressed this season. Through 34 games, he is shooting 28.2%.
“I mean, it’s got to go down at some point,” he said, with a laugh. “Like I said, I don’t really pay attention to that and I’m not somebody that has 10 shots a game, so I just try to make the most of my opportunities when I get the puck.”
GEEKIE IS AMUSED by the focus on his shooting percentage, because he feels there are easy explanations for it. The first is that he doesn’t believe he shoots the puck all that much. Over the past two seasons, David Pastrnak averaged 3.79 shots per game in 110 games. Geekie averaged 2.11 in that same span. Only Sidney Crosby (2.45 shots per game) has a lower average than Geekie (2.48) among the top 10 goal-scorers this season.
“I feel like I’m a big quality over quantity person,” he said.
His first season in Boston, coach Jim Montgomery stressed the need for Geekie to get chances from deep inside the attacking zone.
“I think a high-danger chance is better than just shooting it from the wall. That’s kind of the mentality that I’ve had always. I’m not trying to waste shots that aren’t good for anybody,” Geekie said. “Unless I’m trying to create something off it, I’m honestly not trying to put it on net. Maybe that’s why I end up where I end up.”
Pastrnak recently said the Bruins were reminding Geekie to shoot the puck more often. In fairness, Geekie is shooting more this season. Pastrnak said Geekie is “definitely trying to be a little more selfish to take them” when he fights into high-danger areas of the ice. But Geekie acknowledged there are sometimes philosophical differences between his striving for quality over his team’s desire for quantity.
“I think it’s a push and pull,” he said. “It’s like, I don’t think I need to be shooting this, but other people think that it still gives us an opportunity to create a chance. So I just try to keep that in mind when I have the puck”
This is Geekie’s seventh season in the NHL. He was selected by the Carolina Hurricanes with the 67th pick in the 2017 draft as a goal-scoring forward with the WHL Tri-City Americans. His first two seasons as a pro were mostly spent in the AHL with the Charlotte Checkers, before playing 36 games with the Hurricanes in 2020-21.
That summer, the Seattle Kraken held their expansion draft as the NHL’s newest team. Geekie was left off Carolina’s protected list. At the time, it wasn’t expected that former Hurricanes GM Ron Francis would select him for the Kraken, with options like defenseman Jake Bean and forward Nino Niederreiter available from Carolina. But Geekie was the choice, a player whom Francis had drafted while with the Canes.
Geekie had 22 points in 73 games in his first season in Seattle, skating 12:36 per game with just seven goals. His second campaign saw him jump to 28 points in 69 games, but with even less ice time (10:27).
He was a restricted free agent after the 2022-23 season. Francis attempted to re-sign him before the deadline for submitting qualifying offers, but Geekie and his representatives declined it. The two sides couldn’t find common ground. Rather than go to arbitration, where the Kraken weren’t keen on Geekie potentially setting the terms of his next deal, they chose not to qualify him, making him an unrestricted free agent.
“With Morgan, we did make what I felt was a pretty fair offer,” Francis said at the time, via Sound of Hockey. “It didn’t work out, and he has the right once we don’t qualify him to go elsewhere.”
And so he went to Boston, signing a two-year deal worth $4 million in total.
While he wasn’t seeing much time with the Kraken, Geekie felt he was improving as a player. He said a “integral part” of that development was thanks to Jonathan Sigalet, a skills coach who improved all facets of his game.
“When I first started working with him, he was adamant that he wasn’t going to try and make me play like I’m on the first line,” Geekie recalled. “He said, ‘We both know that trying to do things that you do on the first line on the fourth line is going to get you in the press box.'”
He said working with Siglet slowed the game down for him. He started to see the game differently. He began to see “little tendencies” that all of the NHL’s good players share. Geekie also appreciated having a “third party” assessment for his play, apart from that of his coaches and his own.
Geekie was immediately given an opportunity to thrive in Boston in 2023-24, playing 15:21 in his first game with the Bruins. He ended up averaging 15:25 per game, with 17 goals and 22 assists in 76 games. He earned time with Pastrnak and Pavel Zacha on the Bruins’ top line.
His follow-up season didn’t start well. Geekie scored one goal in his first 17 games and was a healthy scratch early in the season. Some trade whispers started about him as a pending restricted free agent. He had eight goals by the end of the 2024 calendar year.
How did he end up with 33 of them? With one of the greatest goal-scoring heaters this side of Alex Ovechkin: Geekie scored 14 goals in his last 20 games of the season. His chemistry with Pastrnak was undeniable — the Bruins scoring ace assisted on 21 of Geekie’s 33 goals last season.
Geekie expressed a desire to stay with the Bruins. The feeling was mutual, as GM Don Sweeney in June handed him a six-year, $33 million contract for a team-friendly $5.5 million annual cap hit.
WHEN GEEKIE SIGNED his new contract, he decided he wanted to join in the tradition of NHL players celebrating a windfall with their teammates. It’s usually a dinner or something of that nature.
But Geekie wanted to do something different.
“Everybody’s eating at the same restaurants in every city. And I’m sure they’d remember it for a little while, but I think it would be just one of those things like, ‘Hey, thanks for dinner.’ So I wanted to do something a little more nostalgic,” he said.
Geekie is a huge baseball fan who played competitively until his late teens. He was in the process of designing a personalized baseball glove for himself through a company called 44 Pro Custom Gloves when his wife, Emma, suggested that he design ones for all of his teammates as a gift.
Geekie started the process in July, sketching out what he wanted on the gloves for 30 teammates — including players that were on the bubble for the Bruins’ roster this season. He had the biographical information for them, from their birth cities and countries to their schools to where they played junior hockey.
“Honestly, for probably three weeks, I just sat in front of my TV watching baseball and I would just draft gloves up. I thought it was so fun,” Geekie said. “My wife got sick of me for a little while.”
He would FaceTime his brother Noah, a coach at Okotoks Dawgs Academy in Alberta, to bounce the designs off him and get input. He was cognizant of having the designs as unique as possible, despite some of the school colors being similar for his teammates.
Before a practice in October, Geekie delivered the gloves to the locker room stalls of his teammates. It went over well.
“Baseball is not that big in Sweden, but it’s obviously cool to have,” center Elias Lindholm told the Bruins website, having received a glove with a Swedish flag on it. “Hopefully, when my kids get a little bit older, we can play a little game or something. For now, it is just going to be at home, resting.”
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Morgan Geekie nets goal for Bruins
Morgan Geekie nets goal for Bruins
While the gloves were a chance to celebrate with his teammates, there weren’t many celebrations anticipated for Boston this season. The Bruins were trading players away at last season’s trade deadline, sending mainstays like captain Brad Marchand (Florida), center Charlie Coyle (Colorado) and defenseman Brandon Carlo (Toronto) elsewhere. They had an incoming first-year coach in Marco Sturm. At best, it was supposed to be a transition year for the Bruins.
But through 34 games, Boston is second in the Atlantic Division with a 20-14-0 record, within a point of division-leading Detroit in the crowded Eastern Conference.
Many around the NHL were surprised. Geekie wasn’t.
“We underperformed. Last season was like the perfect storm of bad events with our kind of discombobulated training camp and then having a coaching change and just kind of everything that could have went wrong went wrong,” Geekie said. “The core group we have is just too good to be written off. But I understand why people had doubts about us.”
But defying doubts is what Morgan Geekie’s all about, whether it’s his team’s predicted finish in the standings or his own predicted regression as a scorer.
“He has everything to score 50 in this league,” Pastrnak said. “He has a heck of a shot. He has the goal-scoring instincts. He is going to get it one day.”
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