Florida Panthers players celebrate a goal by Sam Reinhart, not shown, during the second period of Game 7 of the NHL hockey Stanley Cup Final against the Edmonton Oilers, on June 24, 2024, in Sunrise, Fla.Rebecca Blackwell/The Associated Press
There’s a video clip in high circulation at the moment of Matthew Tkachuk and Connor McDavid in the handshake line after last year’s Stanley Cup final.
Tkachuk slaps McDavid on the shoulder and says, “Hopefully, we’ll see you next year, yeah.”
The way Tkachuk says it, it’s more a statement than a question.
At the start of this season, the Florida Panthers and Edmonton Oilers meeting in a second straight final was statistically unlikely. After the Oilers fell backward into another campaign – they had a losing record after the first month – it seemed fantastical.
But these two teams have absorbed what the rest of the league does not want to accept – that the National Hockey League regular season is irrelevant. It’s a six-month-long training camp, and a chance to make a few bucks.
Elsewhere, this isn’t the case. The last Super Bowl featured the second and third best teams in the league by record. The 2024 World Series was No. 1 versus No. 3. The upcoming NBA final is No. 1 versus No. 6.
This year’s Stanley Cup final will feature the ninth-ranked team overall versus the 11th.
The defending champion Panthers have played in 12 playoff rounds over the last three years. They’ve had home ice three times, and will go this entire post-season without it.
But having watched them for the last two months, has it struck you that the Panthers ever doubted they would be here? When it came time to stare down the Lighting, Maple Leafs and the Hurricanes – teams with better records – did they carry themselves like they had anything to prove? Instead, the opposite was true.
The NHL regular season has become the multiple choice exam you take to get your learner’s permit. When I took it on a touch screen some years back, it included a question asking which emergency vehicle has a flashing blue light. There was an illustration above the question showing a snow-removal truck with a flashing blue light. The answer was so blindingly obvious that I assumed it was a trick and got it wrong. In this scenario, I am most GMs and team owners in the NHL.
Even though the league has spent decades telling people the Stanley Cup is the hardest trophy in sports to win, only a few smart teams have listened. They don’t go 100 per cent 100 per cent of the time until the post-season.
The stacked, experienced ones – like the Oilers and Panthers – cruise into April at 70, 80 per cent, and then hit the boosters.
The thick ones – like the Winnipeg Jets and the Toronto Maple Leafs – are so terrified of disappointing their fans again that they’ve become delusional about what the regular season means. They act like it matters.
At the same time that Leafs GM Brad Treliving was admitting this week that he runs an operation built on sand, he was still trying to get some credit for winning the Atlantic Division. You might as come into the annual post-mortem wearing a ’Participation’ ribbon.
There are two ways to alter this problem (I won’t say ‘solve’, because it’s only a problem if you’re a consistent loser).
The first would be to make the regular-season standings matter. Give the leading team its choice of playoff route, a la the PWHL. Maybe they get to skip the first round altogether, a la the NFL. But as currently constructed, there is no advantage to killing yourself all season long just so that you can be hurt and/or tired when the post-season begins. There is instead an active disadvantage.
And yet, people still do it. How often have you heard a coach say ‘everyone’s hurt in the playoffs’? No one asks the obvious next question – Why?
You’re running an elite athletic enterprise. Your only job is to put these guys in a winning position. Now that it actually matters, you’re telling us that everybody is aching and exhausted? That was your only job, so why didn’t you plan for it? Because it would be hard, I guess.
The other fix is the same one that gets talked about every year at this time – take the divisions out of the post-season ranking. In either conference, No. 1 plays No. 8 and so on.
This would have the added bonus of making it less likely that the playoff matchups are locked in by February. The NHL is the only entertainment business on Earth that designs systems built to thwart drama. It’s only right at the end that it gets good.
If either of these changes were made, the league would be different, and so would its mindset.
Right now in Toronto, they’re wondering if they should bother bidding for free-agent Mitch Marner. The thinking goes something like this – how do you replace the 100 points he scores?
That is regular-season thinking.
Post-season thinking is how do you find the imaginary production that Marner could never come up with in the playoffs? When you think that way, the answer is obvious – the Leafs shouldn’t swing the door so hard that it hits Marner, but they should make sure to lock it after him. You don’t want him sneaking back in.
The Oilers and Panthers have spent the last couple of years practising playoff thinking. They don’t talk about regular season results. They don’t worry about a guy missing six weeks over Christmas.
When people get too expensive, they let them go, because there’s always someone cheaper who’s hungry to win. They have freed themselves of the tyranny of small, achievable goals.
There is only one marching order – win in June.
These two teams have so fully absorbed that prime directive that they’ve not only gotten to consecutive finals, but they were able to call their own shot.