LAS VEGAS (AP) — Vegas Golden Knights center William Karlsson will return for Game 1 of the team's second-round playoff series against the Anaheim Ducks on Monday night after missing nearly six months with a lower-body injury.
“He doesn't speak a lot, just plays the game the right way,” Golden Knights coach John Tortorella said following an optional practice that morning. “Looking forward to getting him back in the lineup.”
Karlsson was hurt in the first period of Vegas’ 4-3 overtime loss against the Ducks on Nov. 8.
“It's been a long journey, but now I'm here," Karlsson said. "It feels good.”
Karlsson had four goals and three assists early in the season before the injury. He had back-to-back 50-point seasons, but finished with only 29 in 53 games last season, when he was sidelined twice because of injuries.
The Golden Knights held out the possibility that Karlsson, who has been an excellent two-way player, would return at some point even if it was deep in the playoffs. The organization never placed him on long-term injured reserve.
“I always had the goal in the back of my head that I wanted to return,” Karlsson said. “I always believed, so that kind of kept me going."
He was asked what his expectations were of his first game back.
“A hatty and six assists,” Karlsson said jokingly. “I'm going to keep the expectations low.”
Speculation of his return intensified when Karlsson returned to practice last week in Salt Lake City when the Golden Knights were playing the Utah Mammoth in their first-round series. He also practiced with the club's American Hockey League affiliate in the Las Vegas suburb of Henderson.
Karlsson said getting his timing back could be an issue, but he thought “conditioning should be there. Get the chemistry going with the team again.”
Defenseman Jeremy Lauzon, who took a puck to his helmet in Friday's 5-1 series-clinching victory at Utah, will not play, Tortorella said.
AP NHL playoffs: https://apnews.com/hub/stanley-cup and https://apnews.com/hub/nhl
FILE - Vegas Golden Knights center William Karlsson (71) plays against the Los Angeles Kings during an NHL hockey game, Oct. 8, 2025, in Las Vegas. (AP Photo/John Locher, file)
NEW YORK (AP) — Pulitzer Prize officials awarded the fiction prize to an author with a history of experimenting with genres and with language itself: Daniel Kraus, cited for “Angel Down,” a World War I narrative with a celestial twist that unfolds over some 300 pages in one long sentence. “Liberation,” Bess Wohl's look back at the feminist consciousness-raising groups of the 1970s received the drama prize.
Winners announced Monday included two books rooted in the country's founding. Jill Lepore's “We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution” won for history, and Amanda Vaill's “Pride and Pleasure: The Schuyler Sisters in an Age of Revolution” was the winner for biography. Yiyun Li’s “Things in Nature Merely Grow,” her blunt account of the suicides of her two sons, was cited for memoir-autobiography. Brian Goldstone's “There is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America” won for general nonfiction.
The poetry prize went to Juliana Spahr's “Ars Poeticas,” and the music award was given to Gabriela Lena Frank for “Picaflor: A Future Myth,” a symphonic work inspired by Andean legend and California wildfires.
The 50-year-old Kraus has had a diverse and prolific career quite unlike the average Pulitzer fiction winner. He has written horror, science fiction, graphic novels and books for kids. He has collaborated with filmmakers George Romero and Guillermo del Toro, whose Oscar-winning “The Shape of Water” was conceived with Kraus' help. He has received numerous prizes over the years, including the Bram Stoker Award for horror, but had never imagined he'd win a Pulitzer. When he began receiving texts Monday — that included such messages as “Wow!” — he worried that he had somehow gotten himself in trouble.
Pulitzer officials praised “Angel Down” as “a stylistic tour-de-force that blends such genres as allegory, magical realism, and science fiction into a cohesive whole, told in a single sentence.” Kraus says that he at first used a conventional narrative but found that abandoning traditional punctuation better suited a story of war that seemingly had no end.
“It's like you have the feeling of being locked into the book forever,” he told The Associated Press during a telephone interview.
Wohl’s memory play collects second-wave feminists from all walks of life as they tackle misogyny, internalized homophobia, domestic abuse and gender roles. The play navigates between past and present, and six of the actors disrobe for the Act 2 opening scene. The win comes a day before the Tony Award nominations, when “Liberation” is expected to be named in the best new play category.
Lepore is a New Yorker staff writer and Harvard University professor whose Pulitzer helps confirm her as one of the country's most prominent historians, her previous honors including the Bancroft Prize for “The Name of War” and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for “New York Burning.” In 2023, she contributed an introduction to Paul McCartney's book of Beatles photos, “1964: Eyes of the Storm.”
Entertainment Writer Mark Kennedy contributed.
FILE - Signage for The Pulitzer Prizes appear at Columbia University, May 28, 2019, in New York. (AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews, File)
FILE - Bess Wohl attends the Glamour Women of the Year Awards at The Plaza Hotel on Tuesday, Nov. 4, 2025, in New York. (Photo by Evan Agostini/Invision/AP, File)
