Fans at Lenovo Center chanted “no means no” at Carter Hart during Game 2 of the Stanley Cup Final on Thursday night, and the taunt was loud enough to carry into the broadcast. It was the second straight game in Raleigh, North Carolina, where Hart was singled out by the crowd.
The chants began about seven minutes into the first period and came after similar jeers in Game 1, when fans repeated the same words several times as Hart handled the puck. For a 27-year-old goaltender who has started all 18 of Vegas’ playoff games and won 13 of them, the scene turned a championship night into another public reckoning.
Hart entered Game 2 with a.923 save percentage and had stopped 25 of 29 shots in Vegas’ 5-4 win in the opener, making him central to the Golden Knights’ push. That on-ice role is why his name keeps surfacing now, not just because he is playing but because he is playing this deep into the postseason, under the brightest possible spotlight.
The noise around him is tied to a case that has shadowed his career for more than a year. Hart was one of five players on Canada’s 2018 World Juniors team acquitted by the Ontario Superior Court on July 24, 2025, after facing sexual assault charges linked to an alleged June 2018 incident in a London, Ontario, hotel room. The NHL had already ruled the players ineligible in January 2024 and later suspended them after reinstatement, calling their behavior “deeply troubling and unacceptable.”
Hart addressed the verdict on Monday, saying he had learned a lot and grown a lot since then. He also said the Vegas Golden Knights Foundation had helped him integrate into the community and meet people, while praising the culture around the team. But those words sat alongside a different reality in Raleigh, where the crowd kept returning to the same chant even after the first game made clear the message would not stay in the stands.
A member of the Golden Knights’ communications staff ended Hart’s media availability after about six minutes, though the scheduled block had been 15 minutes. That cut short a session that might have answered how he was handling the attention, and it left the bigger question hanging over the series: whether the NHL or Vegas will say anything as the Final moves on to Game 3.
