The Florida Panthers and Edmonton Oilers prepare to begin the Stanley Cup final on Saturday at Sunrise. This will be a matchup not to be missed for many reasons, including these.
Indeed, because the two clubs involved will have the opportunity to achieve something big. The Panthers, members of the National Hockey League since 1993, have never been able to lift the big trophy, and undoubtedly their fans no longer believed in it, having already seen their favorites miss the playoffs for 10 consecutive seasons from 2000 to 2011. The Oilers have already had the opportunity to drink from Lord Stanley’s big bowl, but that’s already been a few generations ago, and we have to go back to the spring of 1990 and the big goal of Petr Klima in overtime of the first game against Boston, in the final, to retrace the Oilers’ last coronation. Also, we will certainly not neglect this precious detail: no Canadian club has seen the Cup very closely since the Canadian in 1993, when a young Gary Bettman presented the trophy to Guy Carbonneau on the ice of the late Forum from Montreal.
Aleksander Barkov has only just been crowned the best defensive forward in the NHL – he won the Selke Trophy in May – a fully deserved honor, moreover. This is really good timing, because we assume that he will probably have to follow, or try to follow, Connor McDavid in the coming days. With 31 points in 18 playoff games so far, the Oilers’ star player is the playoff’s leading scorer, and if the Panthers ever push themselves with the big trophy, it will undoubtedly be because McDavid failed to produce as he can do it. According to Natural Stat Trick, McDavid has been held to just one point at five-on-five the last three seasons when he was on the ice with Barkov. For the Panthers, that looks like a recipe for success.
The Oilers captain arrived in the National Hockey League in 2015, and he has never been closer to his ultimate goal. Two years ago, McDavid’s Oilers reached the conference final, and that was the 27-year-old’s longest run before this one. With parity being what it is, who knows if McDavid will ever get another chance? There will therefore be a lot of talk about him in the coming days, about this ring that he is missing, about his legacy, which will undoubtedly not be the same if this journey, and all the others, do not take him to the top. In NHL history, there is only one player among the league’s top 10 scorers who failed to earn a ring: Marcel Dionne, too often leading bad teams in the Kings in LA. We presume that McDavid does not want to suffer a fate similar to that of Dionne, who obviously would have deserved much better.
Clearly, the Florida Panthers and Edmonton Oilers don’t value the goaltending position the same way. This season, the Panthers paid $10 million for their starting goalie, Sergei Bobrovsky, while the Oilers spent $2.6 million on their starting goalie, Stuart Skinner, who isn’t even the highest-earning goalie in the organization (that would be Jack Campbell, who the Oilers paid $5 million to spend most of his time in the AHL). If Skinner leads his club to the top, he would join a select club of goalies like Adin Kill, Darcy Kuemper and Matt Murray, all of whom have rings while Carey Price, Roberto Luongo and Henrik Lundqvist don’t.
Not among the Florida Panthers, in any case, who have no players from our beautiful province at the moment. It’s barely better with the Oilers, where defender Vincent Desharnais is our only representative. For comparison, the Oilers used 12 Ontario players this season, while the Panthers played 9 skaters from Ontario. Is this another sign of the inevitable decline of our hockey? We’ll let you draw your own conclusions.