NHL
Stanley
Cup Final
SUNRISE, Fla. — There are miniature Stanley Cups painted into the center ice red line at the Florida Panthers’ practice facility.
They are representative of the franchise’s first-ever NHL championship last year. What will they come up with now?
Tuesday night’s convincing 5-1 win over the Edmonton Oilers in Game 6 clinched the Panthers’ second consecutive Stanley Cup win, a feat that has them entering the dynasty discussion.
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Are they a dynasty?
“Hell yeah. Absolutely, absolutely,’’ Panthers star Matthew Tkachuk said as his team celebrated around him on the ice.
At the very least, a “dynasty” within the salary-cap era context.
The Panthers, who were playing in their third straight Stanley Cup Final after winning the Presidents’ Trophy in 2022, join the 2020 and 2021 Tampa Bay Lightning and 2016 and 2017 Penguins as the only repeat champions in the cap era.
It’s rare to do it in a league full of parity.
“It’s really hard,” Hockey Hall of Fame executive Jim Rutherford, architect of those Penguins championship teams, told The Athletic. “You don’t have much of a break in the offseason. So you’re already starting a little behind the curve, where the players aren’t necessarily as refreshed as the other teams. You’re targeted all year as the team to beat. So you’re not getting any easy games.
“And then, of course, you get to the playoffs and everything ramps up and every team wants to beat you. You’re going to run into some games and it doesn’t go your way. You have to stick with it. But what the Florida organization has done is they’ve learned how to win and they know how to win. They go back at it the same way every game.”
Sam Reinhart, who scored the Game 7 winner last June, scored four goals (two empty-netters) for the first playoff hat trick in Panthers history. His four-goal game tied a Stanley Cup record.
Tkachuk, who tied Reinhart and Carter Verhaeghe for the team lead with 23 points, scored the Cup-clinching goal with a first-period goal.
Aleksander Barkov became the first European to captain multiple Stanley Cup champions. Paul Maurice, who along with Toe Blake, Scotty Bowman and Tommy Ivan are the only coaches in NHL history to take their team to the Stanley Cup Final in each of their first three seasons with a franchise, became the first coach in NHL history to win 11 series in his first three seasons with a franchise.
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Sam Bennett led the Panthers with an NHL-leading 15 goals. But what made the Panthers so daunting this postseason was their balanced scoring. Not only did a third liner in Brad Marchand, a trade deadline pickup, finish second on the team with 10 goals, the Panthers tied the 1980 Islanders for having the most players (nine) with at least 15 points. Six of those had at least 20 points to tie the 1983 Islanders and 1985 Oilers.
Six players in Tuesday’s lineup were not part of the Panthers’ championship last year. One of them, fourth-liner A.J. Greer, explained what makes Florida so successful.
“Culture, organizational commitment to being great and never staying comfortable, and the love for one another and the love for the people around you,” Greer said. “I see a lot of people (in Boston and Chicago) saying, ‘Oh, I can’t believe we traded Marshy. Oh, I can’t believe we traded (Seth Jones), look what they’re doing now.’
“They’re great players. They’re amazing, right? But there’s a reason why they’re doing so well here. It’s the culture. Everyone levels their game up here, every one of them, myself included. There’s a sentiment of greatness (here), … wanting to be as good as you were yesterday. (Most the players) won the Cup (last year) and they’re just as hungry this year to win another one. Guys are going just as hard in the gym. There’s no complacency here.”
Dean Lombardi, GM of the 2012 and 2014 Stanley Cup champion Los Angeles Kings, pondered the question about why it is so hard to win multiple titles with the same team and actually believes there’s an advantage in having won that becomes part of that success.
“On the one hand, you say it’s harder to repeat, I hear that all the time. But if I look at my team, the one advantage you have when you’ve won is you know how to win,’’ Lombardi said. “It’s harder to win again because the players get back and they’re tired, it’s a long grind. I think the Stanley Cup playoffs, by far, out of the four major sports, it’s not even close as far as the road you have to travel physically and mentally to win it all. So yes, there’s a toll it takes on your players mentally and physically.
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“But, on the other hand, now that you’ve been through it, that is a huge advantage, knowing how to win.’’
Lombardi was honored at a dinner at the GMs meeting in March and part of his 40-minute speech to GMs was crediting both the Panthers and Vegas Golden Knights (Cup champs in 2023) for how differently they went about building their championship rosters.
“What I mentioned that night is that most championship teams in the past built their nucleus through the draft, and you look now at Florida with three drafted players and I think Vegas with one or two, I looked at those two GMs during my address and said, ‘That took major league balls to do what you guys did, I’m astounded that you pulled this off,'” Lombardi said with a laugh.
But his point is that Florida, in winning back-to-back titles, has done it with an aggressive approach both in trades and clever signings but not really through the draft. Which is different than championship teams from the past.
“That was unheard of back when I started,” Lombardi said. “That’s the thing I find most interesting. How Zito did it is phenomenal. I cited both him and (Vegas GM Kelly McCrimmon) because they broke the mold. It’s very different from my generation. One of the reasons we built through the draft in my day was obviously a way to get talent but also history has shown that with too many mercenaries (free agents) you don’t win.
“What Florida has done, it’s not only credit for building it, but the way (Panthers GM) Bill Zito did it to break the mold, we all admire people who break conventional wisdom and are successful,’’ Lombardi added. “He’s a pioneer.”
Told on Tuesday after another Cup win of Lombardi calling him a pioneer for the way he’s built the Panthers, Zito smiled and deflected.
“Yeah, and some luck,” Zito said as his team celebrated. “We have a wonderful staff, they’re prepared, they work hard. So then when we go to make decisions, it’s easy to do and they’re not all bold. Sometimes we know things that other people don’t. I knew Seth (Jones), we had worked together (in Columbus). So it makes it easier when you have that luxury.”
Zito’s boldness in trades is at the forefront of Florida’s success, to be sure.
“They have a general manager in Bill Zito that knows where the team’s at in the league and he does what he needs to do to give the team every chance to win,’’ Rutherford said. “They have an exceptional coach that knows how to win. And with a really good group of players that buy into what the organization is doing. And they put themselves in a position to be successful.”
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Carter Verhaeghe, who scored the series clincher in the Eastern Conference final, credited Marchand, Jones, Nate Schmidt and all of the new guys in Florida’s locker room for bringing a certain hunger the returners needed.
Greer again circled back to the culture created by the Panthers, an organization that until 2022 had gone 25 years without even a playoff round win, and leaders like Barkov, Tkachuk and Panthers lifer Aaron Ekblad.
“The way they treat us, everything they give us, from the trainers and management, to the food, the way we travel, the way we recover, I’ve never seen this before and there’s a reason why we’re doing so well,” Greer said. “It’s the culture and it’s something that was definitely built here and it’s something that’s respected. Culture can be brought in, but it can quickly go out the door, too. You see it all the time. So, it’s the way that these leaders respect that culture and keep that culture within the group.”
(Photo: Mike Carlson / Getty Images)
