Panthers' Journey from NHL Punchline to Stanley Cup Champions
Panthers' Journey from NHL Punchline to Stanley Cup Champions
The Florida Panthers are Stanley Cup champions. Not a joke. Not mocked for low attendance. No longer languishing in mediocrity, both on and off the ice, as the team went 25 years between playoff series victories.
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The Florida Panthers nearly added to their history of embarrassment. They almost became just the third team in NHL history to blow a 3-0 Stanley Cup Final series lead, forcing a Game 7 against the Edmonton Oilers. It could have been reminiscent of the Atlanta Falcons in Super Bowl LI, Greg Norman in the 1996 Masters, or the 1942 Detroit Red Wings, the only team to lose the Stanley Cup Final after leading 3-0.
That would have been very "Florida Panthers," but that’s not who this franchise is anymore. They’re not a joke. They’re Stanley Cup champions.
It's fitting that Florida won the Stanley Cup against a Canadian team—a nation that once saw the Panthers as potential relocation candidates or just a team in a warmer climate to watch their own teams play at lower ticket costs. The Panthers also eliminated the NHL-leading New York Rangers in the conference finals, a prestigious Original Six team, and earned the respect they have fought so hard for.
Those teams came close to championships. The Panthers are the ones who finished the story, becoming just the third team in the past 40 years to win the Stanley Cup after losing in the previous season's Final.
But perhaps most incredibly, the Florida Panthers—yes, the Florida Panthers!—are now a prestige franchise in the NHL.
"It's pretty freakin' cool," said defenseman Aaron Ekblad, who is second to Barkov in career games played as a Panther. "It wasn't easy those first few years. There was a lot of learning and growing. New GMs, new coaches ... that revolving door was tough, right? The fact that we're at this point now, where the expectation is to make the playoffs and to challenge for a championship, that's a really cool thing. I'm so happy to have been through it all with this franchise."
Barkov stuck with them. Ekblad stuck with them. And more South Florida fans than you'd realize stuck with them, from the rat-tossing mid-1990s to their Stanley Cup parade this season.
Building a Championship Team
When Florida winger Evan Rodrigues was growing up in Toronto, the media covered only Canadian teams and winning teams.
"So I would say I probably wasn't focused on the Panthers too much," the 30-year-old said.
Fellow Ontario native Ryan Lomberg, 29, remembered how the Panthers were covered on social media.
"I remember seeing pictures of the empty arena. Seeing all the red seats and maybe a couple thousand fans. Being a kid from Toronto, I remember not really understanding how the contrast [with other teams] was so extreme," he said. "It doesn't even make sense to me how it was back then. The second I got here four years ago, the fans have been amazing. We have a strong following."
Florida's attendance woes were a league-wide punchline, and the franchise did little to discourage it.
"In 2004, while I was at college in Orlando, I met a guy who was a Lightning fan while I was watching the finals at a bar," Panthers fan David Roth said. "I told him I was a Panthers fan, and he looked at me with a look of absolute bewilderment and just said, 'Why?' As if it were so foreign a concept to be a fan of a team in Florida other than the Lightning."
In 2006, the Panthers were averaging over 4,100 free tickets handed out for each home game. In 2008, the team introduced the "First Timer" program, in which anyone with a valid Florida driver's license could get two free tickets to a game.
In 2010, after LeBron James decided to take his talents to South Beach, the Panthers offered season tickets in the upper deck for $6 per game, ostensibly in honor of his new uniform number with the Heat. Even that price point didn't generate enough sales—the team announced that summer that it was going to tarp off 2,000 upper deck seats for most home games.
"When you go 25 years between playoff series wins and then only make the playoffs a couple of times during that span, you lose a couple of generations of fans," Florida CEO Matthew Caldwell said.
Caldwell ascended to his position in 2016, having worked with owner Vinny Viola for several years.
Viola, who purchased the team in 2013, is one of a handful of majority owners during the team's turbulent history. They were founded as an expansion team by billionaire Wayne Huizenga, who initially wanted to name them the "Block Busters" in honor of his video rental chain.
He sold the franchise to pharmaceutical businessman Alan Cohen and former NFL quarterback Bernie Kosar in 2001. Cliff Viner became general partner in 2010 and made two moves that would set up Florida for later success: hiring former Chicago Blackhawks GM Dale Tallon as head of hockey operations and tasking him with rebuilding through the draft.
When Viola took over, the real work began to repair the Panthers' reputation. It started with the way they ticketed games.
"There was a lot of comp tickets. Just all these gimmicks to get people into the arena," Caldwell said. "That doesn't work in the long term. It really angers your season-ticket holders when you're giving out all these freebies and promotions to people off the streets."
With the team's attendance struggles came constant relocation speculation.
"There were all these rumors that we should be moved," Caldwell said. "That this new ownership group was fixing it up and trying to relocate to Quebec at the time. Those were the headwinds we had to deal with."
The chatter got so loud that owners Viola and Doug Cifu wrote a letter to fans in 2014 to assure them the Panthers weren't relocating. "Our plan is to build an organization that makes South Florida proud and to win the Stanley Cup in South Florida," they said.
But even the Panthers' own municipality was fueling relocation speculation. Broward County did a full analysis of the Panthers franchise and more broadly on whether or not there should be a hockey team in South Florida.
Apparently, the County found enough reasons to commit to the Panthers, agreeing to a new arena lease that put Viola's team on solid financial footing.
"It felt like a miracle at the time," Caldwell said. "But I think the county looked at it like, 'Hey, this is our last shot to see if the sport works here.'"
While the team was getting its financial house in order, Caldwell's next task was trying to energize a fan base that had sunk into malaise.
"When there's a fan base that's mad and angry and looking for a savior, that's actually a little encouraging. At least you know, they're out there and if you do the right thing, they're going to come back," he said. "The problem is that our fan base had become indifferent. There were still like 3,000 or so season-ticket holders that were loyal and wanted to see this happen. But a lot of the casual fans, former season-ticket holders, had given up."
Going 24 seasons between playoff wins will do that to a franchise. But Caldwell said getting their house in order off the ice was important for what would happen on the ice over the next decade.
The Road to the Stanley Cup
When the Colorado Avalanche celebrated their Stanley Cup Final sweep of the Panthers in 1996, they skated through an ever-increasing pile of plastic rats.
The rat-tossing stems from a legendary moment in 1995-96 when forward Scott Mellanby used his stick to exterminate a rat in the locker room before a game. He then used the same stick to score two goals that night—accomplishing what his teammates called "a rat trick." To this day, rubber rats are available for purchase in the official Florida team store for $5 each, with the store selling upward of 150 on game days.
The plastic rats were symbolic of what the franchise had created in its third NHL season: tradition. The Cinderella run bonded hockey fans and minted new ones. A few days after the 1996 Final, the Panthers hosted 15,000 fans at Miami Arena for a celebration of that season's success.
The hopes were high that this was the start of something special for the franchise—then they didn't win another playoff series until 25 seasons later.
"It was brutal. There were so many years in the wilderness," Panthers fan Scott Kandell said. "We always seemed to have one or two good players with promise—like Nathan Horton, Stephen Weiss and Olli Jokinen—but ownership's answer was always to bring in older players past their prime to try to create depth getting over the hump. And it was always with terrible results."
From 1996 to 2022, the Panthers had the 25th-best regular-season points percentage (.513) and the worst playoff record (13-29) in the NHL. There were exhilarating highlights during that otherwise moribund run—Pavel Bure's back-to-back goal-scoring titles, Roberto Luongo's Hall of Fame career, the fact that Florida picked Aleksander Barkov and not Seth Jones in the 2013 draft—but otherwise, it was a bleak history.
But winning does wonders for a franchise.
The Panthers began to build a contender through the draft, taking players like Barkov, Ekblad and Jonathan Huberdeau with top-three picks. They added some foundational players through trades, including goaltender Sergei Bobrovsky. By 2021-22, they were the best regular-season team in the NHL, winning the Presidents' Trophy for the first time.
They made the Cup Final, only to lose to the Tampa Bay Lightning, their rivals and the established class of the state. They were the team everyone assumed would carry the Cup around a packed house in Florida, as they had done in Tampa in recent years.
But that was the Panthers' past. The future is that the Cup resides in South Florida, with a team that broke through and kept pushing until it reached its ultimate goal.
The Celebrations and What's Next
The celebrations in South Florida were massive. Fans gathered by the thousands to celebrate the Panthers' victory, a testament to the hard work and dedication of the players, management, and supporters who never lost faith in the team.
"We always believed," said captain Aleksander Barkov. "We knew that we had the potential to be champions, and we worked every day to make that dream a reality. This is for all the fans who stuck with us through thick and thin."
As the Panthers look to the future, the goal is to sustain this success and build a dynasty. With a strong core of players and a solid organizational structure, the Florida Panthers are no longer the NHL's punchline—they're a team that others aspire to emulate.
The journey from the basement to the pinnacle of the NHL has been long and arduous, but for the Panthers and their fans, it has been worth every moment. Now, the challenge is to stay at the top and continue to bring joy and pride to South Florida.
"This is just the beginning," said GM Bill Zito. "We have a lot more to accomplish, and we're ready for the challenge."