How do you build a team to go to three Stanley Cup Finals in a row in 2025? The Panthers may have found the recipe.
Collective sacrifice, embracing your identity, all with a pinch of salt
Going to three straight Stanley Cup Finals shouldn’t be possible in an era of parity, a hard salary cap and 32 teams, but these Florida Panthers are one win away from making it a reality. Only six other teams since expansion in 1967 have managed that feat, and each of them are regarded as one of the best teams in NHL history. The Panthers are not there yet and are still five wins away from repeating as champions, but as they stand on the precipice of history, the how and why becomes even more important than the what. How has this team turned playoff hockey into an art form, cast-offs into stars and a once moribund franchise into a buzzsaw?
Nothing Paul Maurice does or says is by accident. From his affable demeanor in his press conferences, to the brutal schedule of his training camps, everything he does is calculated towards one goal: winning in the spring. Most coaches talk that talk of course, but so few actually can walk that walk. Maurice doesn’t run a drill asking his defensemen to pin the puck to the boards and keep it there as long as possible for the sake of it, he runs it so that in the dying seconds of Game 7 of a Stanley Cup Final, they can perform in the most trying of circumstances.
If many hockey fans had their way, in hindsight they would have wanted the 2021-22 Florida Panthers to win the Stanley Cup. That team was so offensively gifted, intelligent and elite at making hockey beautiful and pretty, which meant they mastered the art of regular season hockey. But for as impactful as the Buddy Robinson goal against the Penguins on April 11, 2023 is to this Panthers story, so is Pat Maroon’s goal for the Lightning on May 23, 2022. That’s the goal that eliminated the Panthers from the 2022 postseason, and it’s ugly as hell. Nothing is as anti 2021-22 Florida Panthers as this goal is, as is the goal scorer. In that series, the entire organization learned what playoff hockey is really about, and it wasn’t what that team built its identity around.
For the last three years, every move the Panthers have made has been tailored towards mastering playoff hockey after they learned the hard way that winning the Cup is never pretty. If winning the Cup meant sacrificing some of that free flowing rush offense and skill for nastiness and a relentless forecheck, so be it. If it means tiptoeing right up to the line, and sometimes going over that line, works for us. If it means becoming the league’s pantomime villains because they have a reputation for being dirty, well all is fair in love and war.
Building an identity is hard and embracing it is harder. Getting to this point required bold moves, sacrifices and pain from everyone in the organization on down, and they all pulled in the same direction. Paul Maurice talked about his relationship with Bill Zito and mentioned how during the many low points of the 2022-23 regular season that Zito never wavered in his belief that what he was building was going to pay off in the end. He was willing to accept the bad results, and the slings and arrows from fans, to get there. That was a different kind of pain to accept than the pain of taking punishing hits each shift in the playoffs that his players absorb, but each kind of pain made them stronger. You can’t just accept the pain, you have to embrace it and in some ways enjoy the suffering. Those players on the other side of the rink may say they can do all of that, but when pushed in the playoffs, are they actually willing to go there? Just ask the Carolina Hurricanes what that’s like.
Every piece of this Florida Panthers puzzle is fine tuned to embrace this identity and the reality of what it takes to win in the spring. The roster has over fine lines of forwards and four pairs of defensemen ready to roll, because if you’re going to play up to and over the line in the playoffs, not everyone can survive all those hits and all that rigor. Jesper Boqvist is a healthy scratch for the first four games against Toronto, then scores as a top line winger in Game 5. When he’s called upon in the same spot in Game 3 against the Hurricanes, he scores another crucial goal. Tomas Nosek, AJ Greer and Jonah Gadjovich played about as well as they could in a difficult spot most of the regular season, and each started as scratches in the playoffs when new depth came in. But when their time was called upon, they transformed a series in which the Panthers were on the ropes and are now going nowhere.
No matter how much success the Florida Panthers have, they will never have the most money to spend on support staff and infrastructure in the league. When they needed to maximize their dollar, they find creative ways to do so. If you’re going to play an extremely physical style of hockey, you need to find a way to ensure your players don’t break down with injuries all the time. So, they hired a performance director with experience in the NRL and AFL from Australia in Dr. Chris McLellan, because there aren’t many more physical sports in the world than rugby league and Aussie rules football. This style of play shouldn’t be conducive to playing the most games in a three year span in league history, but here are the Panthers on the brink of a 12th playoff series after three full regular seasons of hockey with it looking like they have even more to give. There are no doubt countless more people in this organization who have similar stories to tell. You need to be creative, and maybe even a little nuts, to think outside of the box in a sport where the box is so big and all encompassing.
How do you have the drive and hunger to keep going, to keep playing this way after all the sacrifices made the last two seasons? Keeping it fresh definitely helps, and Bill Zito finds ways to keep his group both fresh and hungry with each move he makes. If there’s a need to fill, they fill it, like adding Seth Jones when the blueline started to show cracks. Need more identity? Just trade for the captain of the Boston Bruins, an enemy in the last two postseasons to become so embedded in the team that his new teammates shoot rubber rats at him after wins. It’s so easy for a message to get stale, and Paul Maurice has enough foresight to know when he needs to make his presence felt and when he needs to let the players figure it out themselves. It’s harder to become tired of a coach when the coach’s voice isn’t constantly echoing in your head.
For as successful as they are, and as successful as they’ve been, the Panthers still have a long way to go in this run. Carolina is not finished yet and the Stanley Cup Final will be an immense lift whether the Stars or Oilers advance. History isn’t worth thinking much about until you’ve made it, and the Panthers aren’t even in the Final yet. But when you look at all they’ve accomplished, all they have changed and sacrificed and the pain, physically and metaphorically that they’ve gone through, how can you not look back and marvel and what they’ve done while thinking about how close they are to reaching even greater heights?
If they don’t win the Cup this year, they’ll come back angry and mad like they did after 2023. If they repeat, they’ll find new motivation to come back and grind all over again. Doing what they’ve already done shouldn’t be possible in this era of the NHL, but they have made it look way easier than it actually is.
Of course, they’ll have to embrace the pain and their identity to finish the job. But like with so much else, they seem to have mastered that too.