The first time Brad Marchand won a Stanley Cup, with the Boston Bruins, his celebrations included a six-figure bar tab and a misspelled tattoo that read: “Champians.” He partied so hard at Foxwoods Casino that when it came time to sit down for an interview with the crew putting together the commemorative Stanley Cup champion DVD the next day, the still loopy Marchand was politely excused. Later, when the team visited the White House, then-President Barack Obama referred to Marchand as “the Little Ball of Hate” and interrupted his own prepared remarks to ask: “What’s up with that nickname, man?” The year was 2011, and the puckish, pugilistic Marchand was 23 years old.
The second time Marchand won a Stanley Cup, with the Florida Panthers on Tuesday night, he was somehow 37, with splotches of white in his playoff beard and words like “veteran leadership” attached to his name. In the 14 years between championships, he’d been back to the final twice and lost both times. But this season, Marchand—who was traded from the Bruins to the Panthers at the deadline and who had 20 playoff points (and zero licks!) for Florida this spring—is a winner once more. In Game 2 of the final, he scored shorthanded and then went on to score in double overtime. (“Go Bradley!” his mother screamed from the stands.)
And with the Panthers’ decisive 5-1 win over the supposedly high-octane Edmonton Oilers in Game 6 on Tuesday, Marchand’s name will once again be scored into the Stanley Cup. After the game, as he was joined on the ice by, among many others, his wife and three darling kids, the artist formerly known as the Little Ball of Hate got nothing but love. “I was telling him before every game, ‘We’re going to follow you,’” the Panthers’ Sam Bennett—who contributed 15 goals this postseason and was awarded the Conn Smythe trophy as playoff MVP—said about Marchand, his former adversary turned teammate. “And we did.”
The more things change, the more they stay the same. This year’s Stanley Cup matchup may have had a few distinctive new faces, but it was also a repeat of last season, when the Panthers faced off against the Oilers. (Florida made the Cup final in 2023, too, falling to the Vegas Golden Knights that year.) And the results were similar as well. Last year, it took the Panthers seven games to lift Lord Stanley (and further stymie Edmonton captain Connor McDavid in his quest to finally win it all). This year, red-hot Florida needed only a cool six games to be reunited with that 34.5-pound hunk of sweet, sweet silver.
Swaggering and smothering, feisty and fleet, the Panthers looked like kids out there. But they also proved, once and for all, that their late-bloomer franchise is all grown up.
They outscored opponents by 38 goals in the playoffs. They went 10-3 on the road but also managed to close out the championship series in front of their fans at home. Goalie Sergei Bobrovsky recorded the fifth-most saves in Stanley Cup final history and boosted his case for the Hall of Fame one day. The Panthers took some gut punches in the final—giving up a goal with 31 seconds remaining in the first overtime of Game 1, losing Game 4 by the score of 5-4 after having led 3-0 in the second period—but also stomached each one like a champ. They weren’t lucky, just really, really good.
“This was harder than the last time,” said the Panthers’ Sam Reinhart, who scored four goals on Tuesday night. (Half of those were into an empty net, but still.) “You know how hard it is to do. Sometimes that benefits you, and sometimes it doesn’t.”
A few halls and walls away from where Reinhart chatted gleefully with the media in Amerant Bank Arena, McDavid summarized the sometimes-it-doesn’t side of the back-to-back Stanley Cup finals experience.
“We kept fuckin’ trying the same thing again and again,” the 28-year-old said. “Banging our heads against the wall.” He and his Oilers had blown some minds earlier in the series with their flashes of brilliance, like when Leon Draisaitl scored in overtime in Game 1 or when McDavid went Quicksilver mode in Game 2. But by Tuesday night, everything looked and felt like a dull headache for the franchise once more.
Before Game 6, an optimistic Draisaitl noted that Edmonton hadn’t even played up to its best yet in the series and had still managed to take two games. They just needed to finally reach the heights everybody knew they were capable of. “I think playing with a lead and just getting off to a better start in general, not being down 2-0 after the first period, will go a long way,” he said. By the end of the first period, though, the Oilers were … down 2-0, and the rest of the game was no more inspiring. Fumbled passes on the doorstep. Bumbling play on the blue line. Another unexceptional showing from Stuart Skinner in net, a depressing reminder that for all their narrative potential, the Edmonton Oilers keep writing the same old story, year after year. It goes like this: A shaky defense and squelched offense are backstopped by a lukewarm hand, and everyone goes home unfulfilled.
McDavid, earlier this month, had seemed aspirationally poised to follow in the footsteps of players like Wayne Gretzky and Sidney Crosby, as he always has. Both of those players, after all, lost their first trip to the Cup final. Then they clawed their way back a year later, faced down the same foes once more, and emerged victorious. The stars seemed aligned! But unlike no. 99, who won his first Cup in his sixth NHL season, and no. 87, who got his in season four, no. 97 is still waiting to put together his best chapter. And next season will mark his 11th attempt.
Next season will also be McDavid’s last one—on his current contract, that is. And suddenly, the question of what will happen after that seems a lot murkier than it did a few weeks back. The ice hadn’t even been Zamboni’d yet on Tuesday night when the TNT studio team started wondering about McDavid’s future. Sure, sure, he could re-sign with the Oilers and keep plugging away, one day leading Edmonton to become the first Canadian hockey team to win a Cup in more than three decades. But also—Connor McDavid, New York Ranger? Vegas Golden Knight? The guy did grow up loving the Toronto Maple Leafs … think about it …
There will be much more to think about on that front as time marches on and emotions settle down. For now, though, it was Matthew Tkachuk who summed up the aftermath of this year’s Stanley Cup bluntly and best. “When you have a player that good and that talented,” Tkachuk said of McDavid, “he’s going to win [a Cup] one day.” Then he twisted the knife. “Wherever it is.”
If any team offers a tempting glimpse of what’s possible for a player with a fresh start elsewhere—especially in a place that has year-round vitamin D and no state income tax—it’s the Panthers. Once a laughingstock of the NHL that hung black shrouds from the arena ceiling in a conspicuous-combover attempt to hide empty seats, Florida is now a downright restorative franchise whose players’ post-Cup quotes sound like state tourism board infomercials. “Coming to Florida was one of the greatest things that ever happened to me,” Tkachuk said after the game. “I’m so glad I signed here,” said a tearful Tomas Nosek.
In the stands, Panthers fans chanted the nickname of their goalie, Bobrovsky, who chose Florida in free agency in 2019 and never looked back. “Bob-by! Bob-by! Bob-by!” In keeping with cherished, longtime team customs, they showered the ice not with confetti but with a bunch of plastic (I hope) rats. Earlier in the series, the Panthers had started a new tradition: team visits to Dairy Queen, spearheaded by none other than a mischievous Marchand. For such a big-boy franchise, these Panthers have been fueled by an enviable level of childlike wonder.
When commissioner Gary Bettman appeared to present the Cup on Tuesday night, the Florida crowd did something that broke with time-honored NHL tradition: They barely even booed the guy! But hey, why should they? Bettman’s NHL is one in which four of the past six Cup winners have hailed from the new great state of hockey, just as the sporting gods intended. You can either beat ’em, or you can slather on the sunscreen and join ’em in the light.
After captain Aleksander Barkov—one of a few “homegrown” Panthers draft picks on the roster—hoisted his second Cup (ouch!), the first players he handed it to were the ones who were receiving it for their very first time: Nate Schmidt, Seth Jones, and even some guys who hadn’t seen any playing time in the final but will forever see their name on the Cup. “It’s got its own heartbeat, right?” exclaimed a breathless Schmidt afterward, trying to describe the feeling. “It breathes all the players that have ever touched it.” And it beguiles all the ones who worry that maybe they never will.
Eventually, the Cup made its way to Florida’s biggest names, the guys who’d been able to play like they’d been here before because, well, they had. Like Bennett, a pending free agent who just guaranteed himself one heck of a payday this summer (wherever it is) with that Stanley-Smythe twofer. And defenseman Aaron Ekblad, who also has some big offseason decisions to make. And Tkachuk, who told reporters that the injury he'd been playing through in the postseason involved an adductor muscle that had been shredded clean off the bone and “some hernia thing.”
The Panthers finally retreated to their locker room, where Tkachuk led a rousing, Champagne-soaked sing-along to Chappell Roan’s “Pink Pony Club.” This was some elite trollmaxing: In happier times, the bop had been Edmonton’s post-win psych-up song. You could see why a guy like Marchand—that ballbuster, that rat king, that certified champian—fit right in on this team after all.
