The Florida Panthers beat the Edmonton Oilers in the 2024 and 2025 Stanley Cup Final, but the while the difference between the two teams was razor thin in 2024, it was more of a deep chasm in 2025.
This year the Panthers proved to be a far better team than the Oilers, in part because the Panthers improved, but mainly because the Oilers regressed as a team.
Simply put the Oilers in the 2025 Stanley Cup final were a slower, less physical team than the 2024 version of the Oilers, in part due to injury, but also because of a major strategic blunder that saw Oilers management move out too many fast and/or more physical players last summer.
Against a defensive juggernaut like the 2025 Florida Panthers that proved to be fatal, especially after the Oilers lost Zach Hyman, one of the team’s fastest and its most physical player, to injury in the Dallas series.
Last year the Oilers out-played Florida most of the Final, but were thwarted largely because goalie Sergei Bobrovsky stood on his head and, essentially, stole victory for his team in Games 1 and 3, matches where the Grade A shots were 16-8 for the Oilers, then 19-8 for the Oilers.
Overall in the 2024 Final, Edmonton had 13 Grade A shots per game on average, while Florida had 8.7, a +4.3 Grade A shots per game advantage for Edmonton.
This year, however, the Oilers had 16.2 Grade A shots per game, the Panthers 15.7, just a +0.5 per game edge for the Oilers, and the Panthers had slightly more of the most dangerous of all shots, the 5-alarm high-danger blasts at net.
Combine that with Bobrovsky’s excellent goaltending, iffy goaltending for Edmonton, and the Panthers taking over the series due to iffy refereeing an their own ever tightening of the defensive screws, and Edmonton was no longer a threat by Games 5 and 6.
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To beat Florida this year, Edmonton would have had to match Florida’s exceptional defensive awareness and intensity. They had to win a 1-0 or 2-1 game.
Just now, that was too tall of a task to ask of this Oilers’ squad. Edmonton is a good and sometimes great defensive team, but it’s not consistently great. It’s not a team that can rely on defence to win a championship. It may never become one.
The Oilers best players simply aren’t wired that way. Many of them fell apart defensively in the Final, either by being too aggressive or too passive on defence.
According to Cult of Hockey video review, Evan Bouchard made six major mistakes on even strength goals against in the Final, Connor McDavid, five, Mattias Ekholm, Leon Draisaitl and Darnell Nurse four each.
But even if the Oilers wanted to match Florida’s defensive play — and I’m sure they did so — they just now lacked the speedy and physical players to pull it off.
What went wrong?
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How might things have been different for the Oilers?
Last summer, the Oilers moved out four players who could fly on their skates: Ryan McLeod, Warren Foegele, Dylan Holloway and Philip Broberg.
Holloway and Foegele were also physical players for the Oilers. As mentioned, the Oilers also lost Hyman to injury before the Cup Final. Connor Brown, a menace against Florida in 2024, was also playing injured in the Final this year.
Without that speed and aggression, the Oilers couldn’t bust up ice with the puck enough or hammer into the Florida end, buzzing the Panthers with fast skates and big hits as they had done in 2024. By Game 6 of the Final, the Oilers could only muster six Grade A shots the entire game. By comparison, Florida had 14 Grade A shots in Game 6.
The Oilers never intended to lose Holloway and Broberg. Perhaps if they had not things would have been different against Florida. But they did lose them. They attempted to replace all that speed and physicality, and got some good work out of fast grinders like Vasily Podkolzin and Kasperi Kapanen. This largely worked in the first three rounds of the 2025 playoffs, where the Oilers were better than ever against teams like Los Angeles, Vegas and Dallas. Their defensive play was good enough, exceptional even in stretches.
But they’d yet to face the best two-way team in the NHL, the Florida Panthers, bolstered from last season with explosive Brad Marchand replacing iffy Vladimir Tarasenko, and sharp-passing Nate Schmidt replacing steady Oliver Ekman-Larsson.
And the injury to Brown and, especially, the loss of Hyman, was a bridge too far. Evander Kane and Corey Perry tried to step up and do some of what Hyman did, but it proved to be too much to ask.
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Maybe if Holloway had been there to take Hyman’s spot it might have been different. But he wasn’t there. And Arvidsson proved to be not enough of a replacement for the speed and energy that Foegele brought.
All of Edmonton’s sharp attacking could not scissor through the hard rock defence of the Panthers. The 2024 Oilers papered over Florida’s stone cold defensive aggression in 2024 with their speed, but without that speed the 2025 Oilers were sunk.
Can the Oilers fix this issue?
Yes, why not? It’s not such a stretch to find fast and aggressive players. GM Stan Bowman found a couple decent ones in Podkolzin and Kapanen as he scrambled to make up for the mistakes made earlier in the spring and summer of 2024.
Young winger Matt Savoie is small, but he’s got speed and aggression in his game. Other prospects like Sam O’Reilly and Noah Philp may also step up. This kind of player isn’t impossible to acquire. But after locking in McDavid and Bouchard, that’s job one for Bowman in the off-season, that and bringing in another goalie to challenge for the top job.
At the Cult of Hockey