OIn what was their third effort in franchise history, the Florida Panthers won the Stanley Cup. They didn’t do it easily. They led by three games against the Edmonton Oilers, let their series lead slip, lost three in a row and set up a decisive seventh game Monday night in Florida, perhaps the most anticipated seven-game Stanley Cup Final in decades. It delivered an anxious end-to-end battle and a thrilling end to a long and unprecedented final round. Excitement is cold comfort for Oilers fans, whose expectations were high following Edmonton’s surprising resurgence. For them, the loss will be even more painful than that of 2006, the last time the Oilers lost the Cup in seven. But for Florida, the Cup is the culmination of a 30-year journey, from early expansion surprise to a laughing stock and back again.
When the Panthers made their first trip to the Cup Finals in 1996, the team was just three years old, one of the NHL’s first forays into the American South. Loaded with quality expansion picks, including star goaltender John Vanbiesbrouck, the Panthers surprised many en route to their Eastern opponents en route to the Cup. But those Panthers ran into a powerful Colorado Avalanche team, recently (and powerfully) departed from Quebec City. The Panthers were swept 4-0. Still, that early playoff run attracted a new fan base and even spawned a bit of team lore based on a story about how forward-thinking Scott Mellanby killed a rat who burst into the Panthers’ locker room at Miami Arena during the team’s home opener that season. While other players jumped out of the way, Mellanby treated the rat like a puck and killed it with a hard one-timer. Fans threw plastic rats onto the ice to celebrate victories – a habit that has stuck.
A few days after the Panthers lost that Cup in 1996, the team held a rally at the Arena to celebrate the “Year of the Rat.” “Miami was hungry for a winning team,” one fan told the Associated Press that day, holding a handful of plastic rats that he sold for $3 each. “We’re finally getting a taste of it.” The attendance of 15,000 fans at the party surprised Vanbiesbrouck. “This is phenomenal,” he told the news agency. Hockey seemed very much at home, even deeply rooted, in South Florida.
But it took almost three decades for the Panthers to reach the finals again. Along the way, people lost interest. In the 2010s, the team struggled to fill seats and resorted to free or almost for free give away tickets. Season ticket holders fled like rats from a ship. And who can really blame them? Two trips to the playoffs in 2012 and 2016 didn’t make up for the years at the bottom of the barrel. The answer ultimately was Bill Zito. Under Zito, who was named general manager in 2020, the Panthers quickly changed for the better, with improved training and nutrition and better data analysis. They improved the players they had or gathered others who worked in the system. And they made large, sometimes strange movements. Jonathan Huberdeau for Matthew Tkachuk? Ten million a year for Sergei Bobrovsky? But they were getting better, albeit still chaotic. Even when they made a surprising run through the playoffs last year, it seemed too good to be true. Their collapse on almost all fronts in the Finals against Vegas last year seemed to confirm the doubts. Florida: Still a bit of a joke.
Not in the locker room. A ‘bump in the road’, says Aaron Ekblad from Florida called the team’s cup final last season. “It stings now,” he said. “But we will find a way to come back next year and become stronger because of it.” It turned out he was right. The joke was on us. The fans are back and their faith in the Rats has been restored. There was no reverse sweep. And the Panthers are Stanley Cup champions.
For a while, Edmonton knew that feeling well. The Oilers’ mini-dynasty of the 1980s – five Stanley Cups in ten years – was unique, but it also created high expectations. The Oilers have often struggled since their last Cup win, even on an economic level. After their ’06 Cup run, they didn’t make the playoffs for a decade and didn’t return until 2017, two years after Connor McDavid arrived.
The night McDavid was drafted in 2015 — an event the NHL hosted at the Panthers’ home court — there were more people in the stands than had regularly attended the Panthers’ games that season. Among them were fans from Edmonton who had made the long trek south to see their new superstar sworn in. The Oilers had finished sixth in the Pacific Division and thirteenth overall in the Western Conference that year, with a goal differential of -85, and Oilers Fans needed something to cheer about. “It’s almost like the draft is our Stanley Cup,” said one fan told the Globe and Mail that night. “No one likes to celebrate small victories more than Edmonton Oilers fans.”
But since then, of course, they want the big ones. It took McDavid no time to place himself on the list of the best players in the world. By naming him captain after his first season, at just 19 years old, he was put on par with the greatest player ever, Wayne Gretzky. Expectations were high to restore the former ‘city of champions’. While McDavid and the rest of the Oilers ended up under a shroud on Monday night, McDavid still stepped out of the Great One’s long shadow. This postseason, McDavid climbed past one of Gretzky’s single-season records, most assists in a playoff season, with 34, on his way to 42 points by the end of the Finals. (Gretzky has the points rating with 47.) Before that, McDavid won the Conn Smythe Trophy as the 2024 postseason’s Most Valuable Player — a trophy he didn’t personally receive on the ice, but one that will bear his name throughout. the same. That’s something. And for now it will have to be enough. A small victory to celebrate, while the big one still awaits. It’s painful for the Oilers, but with any luck it will be a bump in the road.