Panthers defeat Oilers for second straight Stanley Cup title

The first 25 years of the Florida Panthers’ existence was anything but synonymous with hockey success. The Panthers made the NHL postseason only five times and advanced past the second round just once, all while cycling through 10 coaches.

Now, they are hockey’s most dominant franchise — again.

On Tuesday, Florida won its second consecutive Stanley Cup title by outlasting Edmonton in a repeat of last year’s final, winning 5-1 in Game 6 to continue its nearly overnight transformation into one of hockey's most successful franchises. It was the third straight season Florida had played for a title, a run that coincides with the hiring of coach Paul Maurice.

Edmonton won the series opener in overtime, only for Florida to rebound with wins in Game 2, in double overtime, and Game 3. When Edmonton evened the series with an overtime win in Game 4, Florida took a 3-2 series lead by winning Game 5.

The Panthers then closed out a series full of tight games with a blowout that began with Sam Reinhart's unassisted goal in the first period. A goal by Matthew Tkachuk pushed the lead to 2-0, and Reinhart scored the next three goals to turn the closeout opportunity into a 5-0 rout. Reinhart's four goals tied Maurice Richard's in 1957 for a Stanley Cup Final record. It was the second straight year Reinhart played hero for Florida, after he scored the game-winning goal in last season's Game 7 victory.

Florida’s Carter Verhaeghe finished with three assists. Panthers teammate Sam Bennett earned the Conn Smythe Trophy as the playoffs’ most valuable player, having scored a league-leading 15 postseason goals.

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"It's incredible," Florida's Brad Marchand, who won the second Stanley Cup of his career, told TNT moments after the win. "It's a feeling you can't really describe.

"Such an incredible group. Everybody wrote us off from the start of the playoffs. They had everybody beating us in every round, and we just had that fire, and we knew we had something special."

Edmonton scored its only goal in the final minutes, well after the Panthers had already put the game away by scoring three times on Edmonton goaltender Stuart Skinner, in addition to two more empty-net goals.

With its 4-2 series win, Florida is the 10th franchise to win consecutive championships and the first since Tampa Bay in 2020-21. The championship extended the Panthers’ run, continued the league’s southern shift and continued Canada’s championship drought to 32 years, with Montreal the last Canadian champion, in 1993. Eight teams from Canada have made the Stanley Cup Final since, only to come up short.

Since 2004, when Tampa Bay won the Stanley Cup, 10 of the past 21 champions have come from the Sun Belt, extending from Los Angeles to Florida. The four Stanley Cup titles won by the state of Florida alone in the last five years is as many as Canada has produced in the last 37.

To win its second Stanley Cup, Florida had to overcome a choppy regular season in which it finished with only the Eastern Conference’s fifth-highest point total and fifth-best goal differential. A repeat meeting of last year’s finalists was hardly a foregone conclusion, as Edmonton endured its own inconsistency while finishing with the sixth-most points in the Western Conference.

Once they reached the postseason, both Florida and Edmonton pushed through behind offenses that ranked first and third in goal-scoring. Florida also owned the best goals-against average in the postseason, at just 2.5.

In the postseason, the Panthers then had to overcome their weakness of squandering potential series-clinching opportunities. They were just 10-8 in such scenarios since 2023. And closing out the series also meant stopping perhaps hockey’s best offensive weapon in Connor McDavid, the 28-year-old star whose long list of individual accolades in 10 years in Edmonton hadn't yet translated into a team championship.

McDavid's individual brilliance still hasn't, with Florida denying the Oilers a Stanley Cup for a second consecutive season.