The Florida Panthers are Stanley Cup champions for the first time in franchise history.
SUNRISE, Fla. — Desire alone wasn’t enough.
Desire with a splash desperation, however?
Now, there’s a recipe.
Turns out, the Florida Panthers needed to be starring headfirst at an elimination-slash-humiliation game of their own to summon the energy and focus necessary to drive the stake into the heart of an Edmonton Oilers club that left it all out there — blood, sweat, and tears.
Yes, as valiantly as the banged-up, rise-from-the-dead, unshakable-belief Oilers battled to bend and extend the 2024 Stanley Cup Final into a seven-game series, to plant a seed of doubt, and drag ’em back to Alberta, these Panthers were simply too deep and too structured, too scarred and too far ahead, to dismantle completely.