Vegas players, like Keegan Kolesar, stand up for their teammates whenever needed.
There have only been three games thus far in the regular season and Keegan Kolesar has already been in a fight in two of them.
It’s part of his mentality that if a player goes after one of his teammates with a hit he deems a cheap shot, he’s going to go after you with some physicality of his own.
“No one likes seeing their teammates get taken advantage of or getting hit cheap, whatever it may be,” Kolesar said. “We hold each other to a high standard here of brotherly love. No one wants to see each other get hurt. So, it's more like a pack mentality. You go up to one of us. It's like you're going after yourself. They got my back in those situations. I got theirs in situations like that.”
Kolesar isn’t the only one who does it as well. He’s just the most prominent figure who does so. When Mark Stone took a questionable – but legal – hit from Hayden Hodgson in the preseason, a group of Golden Knights rushed to avenge their captain.
Both of Kolesar’s fights have come on the back of hits when his teammates were seemingly defenseless – Kyle Burroughs hit Michael Amadio late and Sam Carrick hit Brayden McNabb while he was getting down on a knee. Kolesar took umbrage with the hits, which resulted in fights with both Burroughs and Carrick.
“We like what he brings and that's part of it,” Vegas coach Bruce Cassidy said. “You need that as a team. You have to have guys that the way the game is to police what's going on out there in in the right way. Right. He’s done that. We have other guys who do that, but he's certainly one guy that we count on every night.
“[Players like Kolesar are] not easy to find or everyone would have a valuable guy like that. There are some but he's definitely one of the better ones.”
At the heart of it, the Golden Knights care about each other and will go to battle for each one. Kolesar credits the year they had last season for helping build a tighter, close-knit room.
“The journey itself brings you closer. You're around each other for an extra two months,” Kolesar said. “You're staying in the hotel, so we play cards. We play poker. We spend so much time together and, through all the celebrations, you get to know guys more on a personal level too because you're spending more and more time around them. It's all of our dreams [to win a Stanley Cup], so we got to remember that rows carry with each other.”
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