In what was their third attempt in franchise history, the Florida Panthers won the Stanley Cup. They didn’t do it so easily. With three games to none on the Edmonton Oilers, they let their series lead slip, lost three games in a row and set up a decisive seventh game in Florida on Monday night, arguably the most anticipated Stanley Cup Final game seven in decades . It was an eager end-to-end battle and a thrilling end to an unprecedentedly long final round. The excitement is cold comfort to Oilers fans, whose hopes were high after Edmonton’s surprising resurgence. For them, the loss will hurt even more than it did in 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 the surprise of early expansion to the laughing stock and back again.
When the Panthers reached the Cup Final in 1996, the team was just three years old, one of the NHL’s first forays into the American South. Loaded with high-quality expansion picks, including star goaltender John Vanbiesbrouck, the Panthers surprised many by outscoring their Eastern opponents en route to the Cup. But these Panthers encountered a powerful Colorado Avalanche team, recently (and forcibly) withdrawn from Quebec City. The Panthers were swept 4-0. Still, that early playoff run attracted a new fan base and even established some of the team’s lore, based on a story about how forward Scott Mellanby killed a mouse who entered the Panthers’ locker room at Miami Arena during the team’s home opener that season. As other players jumped out of the way, Mellanby treated the rat like a disc, killing it with one strong blow. Fans began throwing plastic rats onto the ice to celebrate victories – a habit that persisted.
A few days after the Panthers’ defeat in that 1996 World Cup, the team held a rally at the Arena to celebrate the “year of the rat”. “Miami is hungry for a winning team,” one fan told the Associated Press that day, as he held a handful of plastic rats he sold for $3 each. “We finally got a taste of it.” The participation of 15 thousand fans at the party surprised Vanbiesbrouck. “This is phenomenal,” he told the news outlet. Hockey felt very much at home, even entrenched, in South Florida.
But it took nearly three decades for the Panthers to return to the finals. Along the way, people lost interest. In the 2010s, staff were struggling to fill vacancies, turning to free or almost free ticket giveaways. Season ticket holders fled like rats from a ship. And who could blame them, really? Two trips to the playoffs in 2012 and 2016 didn’t make up for the years at rock bottom. The answer was, eventually, Bill Zito. Under Zito, who was named general manager in 2020, the Panthers have quickly changed for the better, with updated training and nutrition and better data analysis. They improved the players they had or brought together others who worked in the system. And they made big, sometimes curious moves. Jonathan Huberdeau by Matthew Tkachuk? Ten million a year for Sergei Bobrovsky? But they have improved, although still chaotic. Even as they advanced through the playoffs last year on a surprising run, it seemed too good to be true. Their collapse on almost every front in the final against Vegas last year seemed to confirm those doubts. Florida: Still a joke.
Not in the dressing room. A “bump in the road,” is what Florida’s Aaron Ekblad says. called the team’s defeat in the World Cup final last season. “It hurts now,” he said. “But we will find a way to come back next year and be stronger because of it.” Turns 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 scan. And the Panthers are Stanley Cup champions.
For a while, Edmonton knew that feeling well. The Oilers’ mini-dynasty in the 1980s — five Stanley Cups in a decade — was unique, but it also created great expectations. The Oilers have faced many difficulties since their last Cup victory, even economically. After the 2006 World Cup, they didn’t make the playoffs for 10 years, only returning in 2017, two years after Connor McDavid’s arrival.
The night McDavid was drafted in 2015 — an event the NHL hosted at the Panthers’ home rink — there were more people in the stands than regularly attended Panthers games that season. Among them were Edmonton supporters who made the long trek south to see their new superstar inaugurated. The Oilers finished sixth in the Pacific division and 13th overall in the Western Conference that year with a -85 goal differential, and Oilers fans needed something to cheer about. “It’s almost like the draft is our Stanley Cup,” one fan told the Globe and Mail that night. “Nobody celebrates small victories like Edmonton Oilers fans.”
But of course since then they wanted the big ones. It didn’t take long for McDavid to place himself on the list of the best players alive. Naming him captain after his first season, at just 19 years old, put him in line with the best player of all time, Wayne Gretzky – high expectations to restore the former “city of champions”. While McDavid and the rest of the Oilers ended Monday night under a shadow, McDavid still stepped out of the Great One’s long shadow. This postseason, McDavid surpassed one of Gretzky’s single-season records, most assists in a playoff season, with 34, en route to 42 points by the end of the finals. (Gretzky holds the points mark with 47.) For that, McDavid won the Conn Smythe Trophy as the 2024 postseason’s most valuable player — a trophy he didn’t personally accept on the ice, but one that will bear his name throughout. . same. That’s something, anyway. And it will have to be enough for now. A small victory to celebrate, while the big one still waits. It hurts for the Oilers, but with any luck, it will just be a bump in the road.
