Appreciation: The Panthers set their own path to a 2nd consecutive Stanley Cup

Winnipeg Free Press

4 hours ago

The best team in hockey, again, was a team that did things totally its own way.
The Florida Panthers went to Finland early in the season and wore their gifts from that trip — plush robes, a nod to the sauna culture there — to the next few games instead of suits and didn't care how ridiculous that looked. They blared Paul Simon's 'You Can Call Me Al' in the locker room after wins for reasons that nobody fully understood. They not only welcomed a one-time hated rival in Brad Marchand into the fold from Boston at the trade deadline, but they became Blizzard-eating buddies with him on off days during the playoffs.
'This team,' forward Matthew Tkachuk said at one point this season, shaking his head, 'is special.'
'Different,' was the word forward Evan Rodrigues used.
'They are something else,' coach Paul Maurice said.
Call them whatever you want. But you have to call them back-to-back Stanley Cup champions, an absolutely absurd development for a franchise that spent most of its first three decades unable to win anything but now simply cannot lose.
Final score: Panthers 5, Edmonton 1. Final score of the series: Panthers 4, Oilers 2. The result: Another Cup, and a team that won't be forgotten.
'It's incredible. It's a feeling you can't really describe,' Marchand said. 'Seeing the family and everyone up there and everyone that supported me and helped me get to this point, words can't put this into reality how great it feels. Such an incredible group.'
South Florida was a football town when the Miami Dolphins reigned 50 years ago, then became a basketball town when the Miami Heat started winning championships, and it's always been a baseball town because of the area's strong Latino culture. But now, it's a hockey town.
The Panthers never had any doubt that they would repeat as Stanley Cup champions. They didn't care what the regular season results were, nor did they care about their seeding, nor did they care that they were going to have to start every playoff series on the road and probably had the most difficult of all possible paths: in-state rival Tampa Bay in Round 1, a now-or-never Toronto team in Round 2, a tough-as-nails Carolina team for the Eastern Conference title, and after all that, Connor McDavid and the Edmonton Oilers were waiting to avenge their loss in last year's Stanley Cup Final.
The Lightning were overmatched. The Maple Leafs wore down. The Hurricanes couldn't keep up. And the Oilers, after a year of studying, had even fewer answers for the big test.
'We've got to be a dynasty now,' Tkachuk said. 'It's three years in a row, finals, two championships. This team is so special. Stanley Cup champion. This never gets old.'
Everything changed for Florida in July 2022 when general manager Bill Zito shocked everybody by swinging a trade with Calgary for Tkachuk. They went to the final in 2023 and got rolled by Vegas. Back to the final they went in 2024, nearly blowing a 3-0 lead before beating Edmonton for the franchise's first title. This season, there were injuries and suspensions and trades to deal with.
But there was no doubt. Maurice said all that mattered was getting into the playoffs healthy. He was right.
Tkachuk came back despite a torn adductor in time for Game 1 of the playoffs. Aaron Ekblad was back from a 20-game suspension for taking a banned substance in time for Game 3 of Round 1. The Panthers kept getting stronger and stronger, all the way to the end.
They have a player in captain Aleksander Barkov who rarely says anything, just leads by example. They have a goalie in Sergei Bobrovsky who never takes credit for wins, and whose many quirks include not getting any haircuts during the season. They have a coach in Maurice whose claims to fame include overzealous coffee consumption and copious swearing. They did not care who got the credit for anything, because it was a team built for just one thing — winning the Cup, something that required everyone on the roster to do something big at the right time.
That's exactly what happened. And when the Cup was awarded to Barkov, who accepted it as captain, he didn't hand it to Marchand or Tkachuk or Bobrovsky or playoffs MVP Sam Bennett.
He handed it to Nate Schmidt, because Schmidt — who paid for all those Blizzards, by the way — hadn't won a Cup before. And Schmidt handed it to another first-timer, Seth Jones, another late-season trade addition. And so on, and so on, and so on. The last on-ice act of the season was the epitome of what sort of team it was. Backup goalie Vitek Vanecek got to hoist it before most of the regulars; Vanecek, it should be noted, didn't play one second in these playoffs, and the Panthers could not have cared less. He was part of it. He earned his lap with the Cup.
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'These men just love one another,' Maurice said. 'That's the only way to explain it.'
There's a parade in a few days, and then free agency is coming. Bennett could be moving on. Marchand might not stay. Ekblad's future is the source of speculation. The salary cap is the salary cap and everybody can't be kept. But it sounds like Florida will try to keep as much of this team together as possible.
'We're going to enjoy this together,' Bobrovsky said. 'And then, we'll go back to work.'
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AP NHL playoffs: https://apnews.com/hub/stanley-cup and https://apnews.com/hub/nhl