Oilers captain on cusp of becoming an 'all-time great' entering rematch with Panthers in Final
© Curtis Comeau/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images
EDMONTON — Connor McDavid doesn’t need any extra motivation heading into the 2025 Stanley Cup Final against the Florida Panthers.
If he did, though, all he had to do was peer over his left shoulder while sitting at the podium during his press conference at Stanley Cup Final media day on Tuesday.
There, dangling for all to see, was a huge banner of forward Matthew Tkachuk hoisting the Cup after he and the Panthers defeated McDavid and the Edmonton Oilers 2-1 in Game 7 of the Final last season.
That day, June 24, 2024, was one of the worst days in the professional life of the Oilers captain, who openly wept in Edmonton’s dressing room after his Cup dream, which had come so near, remained just that. A dream.
But now, just 345 days later, McDavid’s opportunity for redemption will begin when the Oilers host the Panthers in Game 1 of the Final at Rogers Place on Wednesday (8 p.m. ET; CBC, TVAS, SN, TNT, truTV, MAX). And for the sport’s most spectacular player, it’s time to show the hockey world that he is ready to take that next step, the one that would further his legacy as one of the all-time greats, even if his humility would never allow him to describe it that way.
What he does admit, however, is that the lessons learned from last season’s heartbreak have only strengthened the resolve of he and his team.
“I would say just dealing with the emotion, just because you feel closer (to your ultimate goal),” McDavid said.
“There’s a big circus. You can feel like it’s larger than it is. At the end of the day, it’s another series and we’re playing another great team, and you’ve got to beat them before anything else happens. So, they have our complete focus. All of our energy is going into beating the Florida Panthers.
“There should be nothing else on anyone’s mind.”
© Mike Zeisberger
As such, how has the mindset changed from a year ago?
“It’s different in that it feels less big,” he said. “You know, last year felt monumental, felt very dramatic. This year feels very normal. I would say that’s it.”
Growing up in Newmarket, Ontario, which is located about 40 miles north of Toronto, McDavid had a poster of Sidney Crosby on the wall in his room. Now, as an Oiler, he sees on almost a daily basis the statue of Wayne Gretzky outside Rogers Place.
Interestingly, he finds himself in a similar position to those two greats in his quest for that elusive first championship.
Both Gretzky and Crosby lost in their first trip to the Final before winning the Cup the following season against the same team. Gretzky and the Oilers were swept by the New York Islanders in 1983 before ending that dynasty in five games in 1984. Crosby and the Pittsburgh Penguins were defeated in six games by the Detroit Red Wings in 2008 before edging them in seven games in 2009.
Now McDavid, who leads the NHL with 26 points (six goals, 20 assists) in 16 games this postseason, has a second shot at the Panthers in his effort to get that first ring.
In the process, he is reminded that Tkachuk told him in the handshake line last June that they’d be seeing each other in the Final again next year.
Next year is here. And here they are again.
“I think there’s familiarity there,” McDavid said. “We know what to expect from their game, I think they know what to expect from ours.
“Obviously, they’re the champs. It’s their third Final in three years. They’re a great team. It’s going to be a great challenge and we’re excited.”
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He should be.
After all, the roller coaster which has been the past 12 months has made him stronger, more resilient, more determined — if that’s possible.
First came the low of losing Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Final. Then came the high of scoring the overtime goal for Canada against the United States in the championship game of the 4 Nations Face-Off on Feb. 20.
Add it all up, and McDavid admits he’s not the same player, or the same person.
“Just the comfort of knowing that you’ve played in the biggest game there is to play,” he said. “Aside from maybe an Olympic Final, there’s been a Stanley Cup Game 7 (and) a 4 Nations final. Those are obviously the biggest of the big games.
“This group, obviously, has played in one of those games and come out on the wrong side, but just having gone through that, I think we’re better for it.”
For those who know McDavid, from his childhood to present day, they certainly think he is.
* * *
Less than four months after McDavid’s overtime goal gave Canada a 3-2 victory against the United States at the 4 Nations Face-Off, Doug Armstrong and Bruce Cassidy are witnessing the Oilers captain take his game to a level the Panthers probably haven’t seen before, both in terms of his play and leadership.
They would know.
Armstrong, who is the general manager of the St. Louis Blues, led Canada’s management group for the 4 Nations Face-Off while Cassidy, who is the coach of the Vegas Golden Knights, served as an assistant to coach Jon Cooper. Each admitted to jumping around like giddy children after McDavid took a pass from Mitch Marner and snapped a shot past the glove of Connor Hellebuyck to give Canada the win against its rival.
“The only way you gain experience is to go through situations, good and bad,” Armstrong said Sunday. “And after what he’s gone through in the past year, there’s nothing now that he hasn’t been through before. And it’s showing in his play.
“He’s just accumulating all that knowledge, and he’s putting it into play. Basically there’s nothing out there now that’s going to surprise him. Nothing he hasn’t seen, nothing he hasn’t experienced, nothing he hasn’t felt.
“He’s the best player on the planet. Not only the most talented player, but probably in hockey IQ, too. He’s a special, special player. And when you gain those experiences, it just makes you better, if that’s possible.”
CAN@USA: McDavid buries the OT winner past Hellebuyck, to win the 4 Nations Face-Off Championship
Cassidy did not know McDavid very well prior to the 4 Nations Face-Off, other than as an opposing player who gave him headaches whenever his teams played against the Oilers.
That changed quickly when Canada held its first practice prior to the best-on-best tournament. Cassidy was in charge of running the team’s high-octane power play, which featured stars such as McDavid, Crosby, Sam Reinhart of the Panthers, and Nathan MacKinnon and Cale Makar of the Colorado Avalanche.
“You never know how sometimes the top players are going to take you as a coach when they don’t know you other than they’ve played against you,” Cassidy said from his residence in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, this week. “But he was great. They all were. The interaction was so professional.
“In Connor’s case, he was so coachable and receptive to what we were trying to do, and he’d come back and say, “What if we try this?”
Cassidy had one brief dilemma, though. MacKinnon and McDavid, arguably the two best players in the sport, were both accustomed to lining up in the same spot on the power play.
“Connor immediately said: ‘No problem, I like to move around in those situations anyway. I’ll volunteer to shift,’” Cassidy recalled. “That says all you need to know. He’ll do anything to win.”
Come the title game, that’s exactly what Canada did, thanks to McDavid.
“As great as some players are, in those moments it’s easy to get jitters and miss,” Cassidy said. “Not him. He wasn’t going to miss.
“Look, every guy wants to win, but this guy really really really really wants to win.”
Last month, Cassidy learned that lesson the hard way when his Golden Knights faced the Oilers in the Western Conference Second Round.
In 2023, the two teams had met in the same circumstances, with the Golden Knights eliminating the Oilers in six games en route to winning their first Stanley Cup championship.
This time it was different. This time, Cassidy said, the Oilers were different.
The result: a 4-1 series win for Edmonton.
“If you would have told me McDavid and (Leon) Draisaitl would only get six points each in a five-game series and their power play would only be at 9 percent against us, which is what happened, I would have been happy,” Cassidy said. “That was my game plan going into the series.
“But that team isn’t the same, and neither is Connor. His commitment and their commitment to defense and doing the little things that are needed is a far cry from the team we’d beaten two years earlier. And when your superstars are doing it, well, I saw it from Jack Eichel the year we won the Cup.
“When I saw that, it was like, ‘Oh boy, these guys are going to be dangerous.’ And now here they are. And here is Connor, their leader, ready to take the next step.”
Oilers, Golden Knights go the distance in Second Round of the Stanley Cup Playoffs
* * *
Curtis Joseph chuckled while watching McDavid help the Oilers advance to the Stanley Cup Final with a 6-3 win against the Dallas Stars in Game 5 of the Western Conference Final on May 29.
After all, the former NHL goalie has watched the Edmonton center perform such magic — “Connor just doing his Connor things” — for the past two decades.
A little more than midway through the second period, the Stars had crawled their way back from a 3-0 deficit to get within 3-2. They were pushing for an equalizer, and American Airlines Center was going bonkers. Momentum, every last adrenaline-laden bit of it, was on the side of Dallas.
Until McDavid decided enough was enough.
Skating into a loose puck in the neutral zone, he shifted into high gear and deked around a helpless Casey DeSmith, all with speedy Stars forward Roope Hintz chasing feverishly in pursuit. And just like that, all that momentum, every last bit of it, was sucked out of the building the moment the puck entered the net.
The goal gave Edmonton a 4-2 lead and would prove to be the series-clinching goal in the 6-3 victory.
Game over. Series over. All because of a breakaway move Joseph had seen 20-something years earlier.
“Yeah, he pulled that one on me a few times,” Joseph laughed. “He would have owned me, too, but he didn’t have the type of reach and speed then that he does now.
“And man, does he ever have those things now.”
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When McDavid was just a kid of “six, seven, eight,” Joseph recalled, he became friends with Curtis’ son, Tristan. The boys became linemates for York-Simcoe AAA, a team located in the Newmarket-Aurora area that featured future NHL players such as Sam Bennett of the Panthers, Warren Foegele of the Los Angeles Kings, and Travis Dermott.
Every now and then, Joseph would invite the kids to come play in “The Barn,” the custom-made ice rink Joseph had built inside his barn on his sprawling ranch in King City, Ontario. On sporadic occasions, Joseph, then still a goalie in the NHL, would strap on the pads and let the kids shoot on him.
One of them quickly stood out.
“I mean, you could tell this kid was something special,” Joseph said from his home in Virginia this past weekend. “I mean, there’s fast kids that age, but they plateau at a certain point in the season. He never did. And he was always a team guy first. There were so many times he could have easily scored himself but he’d stop, pull a U-turn and set up one of his teammates for a goal.
“When you see such creativeness, unselfishness and maturity from someone so young, you immediately tell yourself, ‘This kid gets it.'”
Unlike some of the people watching him at the time.
“He was playing a year up, a ’97 birth year playing with the ’96s, and he was dominating,” Joseph recalled. “And he handled the pressure of the parents and the arrows and everything else they would sling at the family. And I’m sure he heard it all, because there’s always jealousy from certain other parents of a kid like that.”
In the end, Joseph said, McDavid was “always above that.”
“He loved the game,” he continued. “He passed to his teammates. He never acted like he was above anyone, but there was always a drive.
“There always has been, and it’s one of the reasons I’m seeing him at a different level right now.”
Joseph, who played 943 NHL games for the St. Louis Blues, Oilers, Toronto Maple Leafs, Red Wings, Phoenix Coyotes and Calgary Flames from 1990-2009, never got a chance to appear in a Stanley Cup Final. Nevertheless, he still recorded 454 regular-season wins, which ranks seventh in NHL history, over the course of a prestigious career that saw him face all-time greats like Gretzky and Mario Lemieux.
“Playoffs are hard, take it from me,” Joseph said. “But I also know, like all the great ones, he knows how great he is. He will never tell you that, he’s too humble. He’s a team first guy, always has been, but they know where they stand in history.
“He’ll never tell you this, but he needs to win a Cup. He knows that. And he’s taken it to a different level. It’s different from every other guy out there. He had disappointment last year, and he’s turned it up a notch the way Gretzky did, the way Mario did, the way Bobby Orr did.
“He gets that Cup, and he’ll be on the list of legends with those guys. And what I’m seeing right now, he’s consumed with doing just that.”
The crew discuss Connor McDavid leading the Oilers in their second straight Stanley Cup Final
* * *
As the Oilers held their modest celebration in the bowels of American Airlines Center after eliminating the Stars last Thursday, one of the first texts McDavid exchanged was with Sherry Bassin.
No surprise there.
Bassin is the former co-owner of the Erie Otters and selected McDavid, who was 15 years old at the time, No. 1 in the 2012 Ontario Hockey League draft. McDavid has said in the past that Bassin became like a second father to him, always watching out for his best interests after he moved to Pennsylvania from his native Newmarket.
As such, McDavid took it upon himself to have Bassin and his daughter fly down to South Florida and provide them with tickets for Game 7 of the 2024 Stanley Cup Final against the Panthers at Amerant Bank Arena.
“It was amazing, it was emotional, it was so Connor,” Bassin said this week. “We were blessed to have him do that for us.
“And then, I mean, he was so crushed after that game. I mean, he won the Conn Smythe Trophy as playoff MVP, but there was no way he was going out there to accept that. Anybody that knows that kid knows that. He doesn’t care about that. He doesn’t care about individual awards. He cares about his team.”
Bassin recalled a time in juniors when a “magnificent” two-goal performance from McDavid wasn’t enough for the Otters to beat the Sault Ste. Marie Greyhounds.
“We’re walking out of the rink together and he told me: ‘I’m sorry. I let the team down.’ I mean, there was nothing further from the truth,” Bassin said. “He had done everything possible, but that’s Connor. That’s how he feels. And that’s how he felt last year.”
Bassin said he hopes to attend one of the games in this year’s Final. And from what he’s seen from McDavid in the past 12 months, well …
“I’ve known him for more than a decade,” Bassin said. “This kid is driven like no one I’ve ever seen. He watched the Panthers celebrate last year, and I can guarantee that struck deep. And from what I’ve seen, he’s on a mission right now. He wants it for his teammates so bad, and deep down, he knows he needs a Cup to take that next step to join the all-time greats where, in my opinion, he belongs.
“You’re going to bet against this guy right now? Good luck with that.”
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