Another team that has never won the Stanley Cup has finally achieved eternal glory. After three decades of living in the shadow of the Tampa Bay Lightning inside their own state, after countless years of frustration and pain, the Florida Panthers have won their first Stanley Cup in their franchise’s history.
Gone are the constant rumors of relocation from the last two decades. Gone are the days where they were mired in mediocrity in the 26 years between playoff series victories. Gone are the days when they had more empty seats than actual fans at their games.
Those days are over. The Panthers are now a team that is feared in the NHL. Grit and sandpaper is the name of the game now, with a dangerous mix of speed, size, and skill that blends into the perfect mold for a championship contending team. They are one of the premier franchises in the league now, and an attractive destination for free agents to come over.
It wasn’t always smooth sailing. There could have been an all-time embarrassment on the horizon. They nearly blew a 3-0 Stanley Cup Final series lead against the Edmonton Oilers. While they dominated the first three games in outscoring the Oilers 11-4, Edmonton forced a Game 7, outscoring Florida 18-5 on the way to the deciding game. A comeback rivaling the Cleveland Cavaliers’ 3-1 comeback and the New England Patriots’ 28-3 comeback looked realistic. A feat not seen in the Stanley Cup Final since 1942 when the Toronto Maple Leafs was looming large.
But it never happened. The Panthers held down for a defensive masterclass, putting Connor McDavid and co. on lockdown for a 2-1 Cup-clinching victory at their home ice.
Beginnings
Back then, being a fan of the Panthers would be a surprise. Outside of the 1996 “Cardiac Cats” run to the Stanley Cup Final, the Panthers had not seen much success, let alone playoff appearances. Led by a strong netminder in John Vanbiesbrouck, they shocked playoff foe after playoff foe, beating the Boston Bruins, Philadelphia Flyers, and Pittsburgh Penguins before getting swept by the Colorado Avalanche in the Final.
Initially founded by Wayne Huizenga in 1993, it looked like that core had hope for the future. However, they would not sniff a playoff series win the rest of the way, with first round losses in 1997 and 2000 to the New York Rangers and New Jersey Devils, respectively.
They only saw the playoffs once under previous owners Alan Cohen and Bernie Kosar. As team performance declined, so did reputation and fan attendance. They even averaged over 4,100 free tickets handed out for each home game in 2006, and even when they offered season tickets in the upper deck for $6 per game when LeBron James made The Decision, that didn’t get enough sales to get fans to watch Panthers games.
But there was a bright spot in 2010. When Cliff Viner became a general partner of the team, he hired Dale Tallon as the team’s general manager and executive vice president of hockey operations. He was tasked with rebuilding the team through the Draft.
Vincent Viola Purchases the Team
Though they fell to the Devils in a hard-fought seven-game series in the first round of the 2012 playoffs, with Vincent Viola purchasing the team, the time was now to repair the franchise’s reputation. However, with more struggles came more questions brought up about how much longer they were going to last in the Miami-Fort Lauderdale metro area.
It got so bad that at that point Viola had to write a letter to Panthers fans in 2014 to tell them that they have no intentions of relocating. But even the Miami-Fort Lauderdale area even boosted the relocation speculation, with Broward County doing an analysis on the franchise and asking whether or not hockey belongs in South Florida. It would take what looked at the time essentially a Herculean effort to garner the fans’ attention to Panthers games.
26 years between playoff series wins will do that to a franchise. In that point, they had the 25th-best regular season points percentage, at .513, and the worst playoff record in the NHL. There were diamonds in the rough, such as Vanbiesbrouck, Ed Jovanovski, Roberto Luongo, Olli Jokinen, and Scott Mellanby, but at the same time, there were also draft picks that never panned out and young players that were traded away too soon. In between playoff appearances in 2000 and 2012, they had seven coaches, with the most infamous being 153 games of Mike Keenan, though they were treading around .500 under Jacques Martin and Peter DeBoer.
Early Barkov Era
Though Jonathan Huberdeau and Aleksander Barkov were already on the team as two top three selections in the Draft, and with Aaron Ekblad being the first ever draft pick with Viola as the majority owner, success didn’t arrive instantly.
Even though Huberdeau saw two playoff appearances and Barkov and Ekblad each saw one, the team saw five coaching changes and a power struggle in the front office between Tallon and the “Computer Boys,” the moniker given to the front office that was invested into the analytics. Tallon lost the power struggle to where he was demoted in 2016, though was later retained in 2017.
Losing Reilly Smith and Jonathan Marchessault in the Vegas Expansion Draft while protecting Alex Petrovic and Mark Pysyk over the two further complicated matters.
Dale Tallon’s Final Years in Florida
But with Tallon at the helm in 2019, a turning point in the franchise was made: They got Joel Quenneville hired as their head coach. Tallon was familiar with him—he was the general manager of the Chicago Blackhawks when he first hired Quenneville. After Chicago fired him, the Panthers came in to offer him a convincing contract, where he accepted.
They also landed two-time Vezina Trophy-winning goaltender Sergei Bobrovsky in the offseason of 2019 on a seven-year contract worth $70 million total. A franchise that has long struggled to land top free agents finally caught a big fish from the ocean.
While Tallon was fired after the 2020 season, expectations for the Panthers were only going up. The team’s future was bright, with prospects that were of the upcoming. Owen Tippett and Eetu Luostarinen were among the prospect pool.
Bill Zito Arrives
The Panthers conducted an extensive search for their next general manager, with 23 interviews, and eventually found the right man for the job: Columbus Blue Jackets assistant general manager Bill Zito.
While the team improved in 2021 under Quenneville, as the team became a perennial playoff contender, expectations continued to mount up. However, Quenneville would not last longer as he resigned in the midst of his connection to the Blackhawks’ sexual abuse scandal and cover-up.
Team CEO Matthew Caldwell said that the momentum of the Panthers could have easily gone down the rails by Quenneville’s resignation as it could have been a locker room distraction. But it wasn’t. Andrew Brunette, who filled in as the team’s interim head coach, led them to their first ever President’s Trophy, and the team’s first playoff series victory in 26 years, but after a sweep at the hands of the Lightning, the Panthers decided to go through an identity change and let Brunette go.
The Shaping of a Contender
By this point, the Panthers had the pieces together in building a championship contender. Zito’s first move was trading away Mike Matheson for Patric Hornqvist, which gave Stanley Cup-winning experience to the locker room. Then came great move after great move. Carter Verhaeghe from free agency, acquiring Sam Reinhart and Brandon Montour from the Buffalo Sabres and Sam Bennett from the Calgary Flames, and claiming Gustav Forsling off waivers.
While Claude Giroux decided to take his talents to Canada’s capital, the Panthers needed something fresh. There still needed to be that change in voice. Paul Maurice previously resigned from his post as the Winnipeg Jets’ head coach, and wasn’t sure if he would ever get the opportunity to coach in the NHL again as he was contemplating retirement. Zito phoned his number, and Maurice was hired to be Florida’s next head coach.
Then came the blockbuster trade of all blockbuster trades, a month after Maurice was hired. Huberdeau, defenseman MacKenzie Weegar, prospect Cole Schwindt and a first-round pick were packaged to the Flames for Matthew Tkachuk.
What seemed to be two questionable moves for the Panthers turned into slam dunks, with Tkachuk committing to Florida through the 2030 season. Maurice gave them the veteran voice that was needed behind the bench and a north-south style of hockey that is built for playoffs, emphasizing on a heavy forecheck, the type of hockey Tkachuk was familiar with in Calgary under Darryl Sutter, and the type of style of play that he is comfortable with.
Championship Experience
Last season, they were out of a playoff spot with 11 days to go in the regular season. But with the Penguins falling out of the picture came the Panthers rising to the last spot. A miraculous run to the Stanley Cup Final as the 16th-seeded team had people opening their eyes. Overcoming a 3-1 series deficit to beat the greatest regular season team in NHL history in the Boston Bruins, rolling through a Toronto Maple Leafs team that won their first series in 19 years, and sweeping a Carolina Hurricanes team that looked like they were destined to be in the Final.
However, they fell short at the dance, as injuries mounted up and they essentially ran out of gas against the Vegas Golden Knights.
While the pain of losing in the Finals stings, it gives them all the more important championship experience to enter the next season. They showed to the hockey world that they have arrived and are not to be taken lightly this time around.
The Rise to Glory
Entering the 2023-24 season, they made some minor tweaks to the roster with major impacts in the hopes that they would prove that their 2023 run to the Final was no fluke. The one season-starting change was that both Ekblad and Montour were not available due to offseason shoulder surgeries.
However, as time wore on, their defensive presence improved. They were one of the worst defensive teams in the league two seasons ago. While they were middle of the pack last season, ranking 21st, they showed what they can do as a defensive unit last playoffs. And they improved to a two-way tie for first place in goals against average this season.
The work of art defensively was also showcased in their Stanley Cup run this year: They did not allow a 5-on-5 goal to Nikita Kucherov, David Pastrnak, Artemi Panarin, Chris Kreider, Mika Zibanejad, Leon Draisaitl, and Ryan Nugent-Hopkins.
Bobrovsky, who was once seen as his contract being a complete albatross as he performed below expectations for his first three years in Florida, became a consistent mainstay with the team and got back into form, starting a new phenomenon: “Playoff Bob.”
The Euphoria of a Champion
After last season, the increased interest in the Panthers was noticeable by many, including Zito himself. The Panthers rose to become a prominent hockey market, the exact vision that Viola, Caldwell, and the ownership group were foreseeing, and what Zito has been building to.
Winning changes everything. Between the plastic rat tossing phenomenon in 1996 to the “Cardiac Cats” from last year to the “in your face” forechecking Panthers that are of today, the euphoria of the taste of glory after many years of waiting is ever so rewarding.
Congratulations to the Florida Panthers on winning the Stanley Cup.
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