Better than nine lives: These Cats have won back-to-back Stanley Cup championships

NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman proclaimed hockey "works in the sunshine." It was hard to disagree (even with him) after the Florida Panthers beat the Edmonton Oilers for the second straight season.

(Not the real Cup, but the resemblance to the Cup keepers is strong)

Having two of the best hockey players in the world on their roster didn’t win the Edmonton Oilers a Stanley Cup championship last season. Nor did it work for them this season, which concluded Tuesday when the Florida Panthers stifled them in a 5-1 victory at Amerant Bank Arena in Sunrise, Fla., and wrapped up the Final in six games.

Hockey is the ultimate team sport. The team with the best player (or players, in the Oilers’ case) doesn’t always win, and that’s one of the game’s charms. Depth, commitment, and excellent goaltending can take down a front-loaded opponent, as the Panthers have proved the past two seasons.

Florida didn’t have superstars Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl at their disposal, like the Oilers did. Florida also didn’t have home-ice advantage in any of its four playoff series.

But thanks to general manager Bill Zito’s astute dealing—highlighted by his trades for super-pest winger Brad Marchand and defenseman Seth Jones before the March trading deadline—the Panthers reached the Cup Final for the third straight season, fueled by their admirable depth up the middle and their solidity on defense in support of goaltender Sergei Bobrovsky. “It’s a privilege to be their goalie,” Bobrovsky said during an on-ice interview after the game.

Their role players played their parts perfectly. And their best players were truly their best players, a cliche that holds an enormous amount of truth.

Sam Bennett earned the Conn Smythe trophy as the most valuable player in the playoffs after scoring five of his postseason-leading 15 goals in the Final. He set a record for most road goals in a playoff year, 13. Sam Reinhart, who scored four goals Tuesday to tie a Cup Final record for most goals in a game, finished the playoffs tied for second with Draisaitl in goalscoring, with 11. Marchand and Edmonton’s Corey Perry each scored 10. Nineteen Panthers scored at least one goal, making them the sixth Cup champion with that many scorers. They tied a league record with six players who each scored 20 or more points. Center Aleksander Barkov (below with the Cup) was his usual brilliant self.

“We’re a dynasty,” Florida forward Matthew Tkachuk said, and it’s difficult to argue with him.

Tkachuk was credited with the Cup-winning goal, but that alone wasn’t the reason he told TNT that this victory was more satisfying to him than last year’s triumph. He tore his adductor muscle off the bone and developed a hernia while playing for Team USA in the Four Nations Faceoff tournament in February, and he wasn’t sure he’d be able to return this season. His post-victory thanks included the Panthers’ doctors, equipment manager, and training staff.

“I wanted to throw in the towel a bunch of times,” he said. “I’ve got to thank a lot of people for getting me healthy. I wasn’t the easiest to deal with.”

Nor were the Panthers. They had an ideal blend of physicality and skill, of patience and persistence. “They’re a well-oiled machine,” Wayne Gretzky said during the TNT telecast, probably not even realizing he’d made a pun. “They just got stronger as every series went along….This is a well structured hockey club from top to bottom.”

The Oilers, who had gone on a 13-2 run after losing the first two games of their first-round series against the Kings, certainly missed injured forward Zach Hyman. But they sabotaged their own cause too often against the Panthers, with defenseman Evan Bouchard’s inexplicable gaffes undermining them a few times too many in the finale. Goalie Stuart Skinner was inconsistent. Evander Kane was rightfully ejected as punishment for his disgraceful slash of Tkachuk with 2:13 left in the third period on Tuesday, a sour postscript to another deflating runnerup finish for the Oilers.

Even the two best players in the world couldn’t end the Cup drought for Canada-based teams, which has now passed 32 years.

“They’re a heck of a team,” said McDavid, who shared the postseason scoring lead with Draisaitl, with 33 points each. “They’re Stanley Cup champions back to back for a reason.”

McDavid, still unable to add a Cup championship to his otherwise glittering resume, said the Panthers’ energetic and ceaseless forecheck “tilted the rink. They were able to kind of stay on top of us all over the place. We weren’t really able to generate any momentum up the ice. We kept trying the same thing over and over again, banging our heads against the wall. Credit to them.”

Oilers coach Kris Knoblauch rejected the suggestion that reaching the Final was any kind of consolation because his team hadn’t been the favorites in the earlier rounds.

“There’s no silver lining to this,” Knoblauch said, acknowledging that a Cup title felt more distant at that moment than it had felt after the Oilers’ seven-game loss to Florida a year ago. “It’s still heart-wrenching. It’s very difficult to handle right now. just because we were maybe the underdogs going into the L.A. series, underdogs against Vegas, the Dallas series.

“It hurts right now, and I don’t think it’s going to let up for a while….It hurts just because we felt that we could have won it all. Yeah, it’s going to be a long summer.”

The Panthers’ summer will be short but happy, again be full of celebrations. In a classy move, Barkov—the Panthers’ captain—made sure to give the team’s first-time Cup champions a chance to skate around with the gleaming trophy before the repeat winners got their turns. After receiving the Cup from Bettman, Barkov did a lap around the rink before handing it to defenseman Nate Schmidt, who appreciated the gesture.

“It was the best lap of hockey I’ve ever had in my life,” Schmidt told NHL.com. “I can’t believe that we are here. I’m just so proud of this group and so happy to be here.”

After Schmidt came Jones (whose father, Popeye, won a ring as an assistant coach of the NBA’s Denver Nuggets in 2023), 32-year-old Tomas Nosek, backup goalie Vitek Vanecek (another pre-deadline acquisition), and so on.

“There are a lot of guys who play a ton of minutes, that have done it, that are the heartbeat of the team,” Schmidt told NHL.com. “And for them to give it to us where, you know, captain, gives it to me and Nosek and ‘Jonesy’ and all down the line, it’s such a selfless act. Honestly, it's really impressive.”

It was as impressive as winning back-to-back championships in a league that’s governed by a strict salary cap, which makes it tough to keep a team together. The Panthers lost some valued pieces after last season, but Zito worked his magic to not only fill those spots but fill them with character and characters. He probably will have to do it again this summer, because Marchand is eligible to become an unrestricted free agent, as are defenseman Aaron Ekblad and Bennett—whose price certainly went up with each goal he scored. “He’s not leaving the building,” coach Paul Maurice joked Tuesday night when asked about Bennett’s future in Florida.

Maurice is among the few NHL coaches who are capable of original thought, a rare difference-maker. He deflected credit to his players, calling this year’s team the best he had ever coached from a talent standpoint. That’s saying a lot, since Maurice has been an NHL coach for 27 seasons and ranks third with 916 regular-season wins, behind Scotty Bowman and Joel Quenneville. Maurice also is the third coach, behind Bowman and Quenneville, to earn 1,000 regular-season and playoff wins.

The Panthers were challenged by injuries during the season and finished third in the Atlantic division, behind Toronto and Tampa Bay. They exacted revenge by eliminating the Lightning in five games before getting past Toronto in a Game 7 played on the road. They polished off Carolina in a swift five games in the East final.

“I don’t know how they got up the mountain,” Maurice said of his team. “We were all standing at the bottom at the start of the year and it looked pretty high.”

Ain’t no mountain high enough, as the song goes, to keep the Panthers from finishing at the top. But the next peak is massive: No team has won the Cup three straight seasons since the New York Islanders won it four consecutive seasons, starting in 1980. Getting back up that mountain again would certify the Panthers as the dynasty that Tkachuk believes they have already become. Hockey does work in the sunshine, but only because the Panthers put in the work in the rink.