Bad news has come through for a potential core memebr of Team Sweden’s 2026 Winter Olympics squad. Despite hoping to return before the tournament, Vegas Golden Knights center William Karlsson won’t be healthy enough to play per TSN’s Darren Dreger. Karlsson is recovering from a lower-body injury sustained in Vegas’ November 8th loss to the Anaheim Ducks. He appeared in 14 games and scored seven points before the injury.
Karlsson has run into a streak of bad injury luck stretching back to the start of last season. He didn’t make his season debut until Vegas’ ninth game of the 2024-25 season and fell back out of the lineup for 21 games in late January. Those absences, and 23 missed games this season, give Karlsson more than 50 absences since October 2024.
That injury luck has left Vegas with a major hole in their center position. Tomas Hertl has stepped up to help fill the hole – posting a 58.0 faceoff percentage on 584 faceoffs. That success rate puts Hertl near the bottom of the top-10 faceoff takers this season. Hertl also has 29 points in 37 games this season, putting him on pace to narrowly pass his 61 points last season. Those impacts have helped Vegas lean on Colton Sissons and Brett Howden as their bottom-six centers. Both have posted faceoff percentages north of 50 percent though they only have five and 11 points respectively.
Karlsson is routinely challenges 50 points when he’s at full health. He scored 30 goals and 60 points in 70 games during the 2023-24 season, the highest marks he’s reached since posting career-highs with 43 goals and 78 points in 2017-18. Karlsson was scoring well below his career-average to start this season. Now, he won’t be able to right that ship until Vegas returns from the NHL’s Olympic break on February 25th, at the soonest. That return date would force Karlsson to miss 20 more games.
More than hurting Vegas’ lineup for the start of the new year, this news will pull Karlsson’s first chance to play for Sweden’s Olympic roster. He has seldomly played for his country over the course of his NHL career, largely thanks to Vegas’ success in the postseason. An appearance at the 2025 World Championship, where Karlsson posted one point in four games, was his first international tournament since the 2017 World Championship. Karlsson has won a Gold medal at the World Championship and World Junior Championships with Team Sweden.
The former SHL ’Rookie-of-the-Year’ would be a reliable center for Sweden in the Olympic games, even though he has only scored four points in 14 World Championship games in his career. Sweden leaned on Mika Zibanejad, Joel Eriksson Ek, Leo Carlsson, and Elias Lindholm as their centers at the 2025 4-Nations Face-Off. This news could help cement those four down the middle when Sweden heads to the Olympic games in Milan.