CELEBRATE IN THE EVERGLADES, PANTHERS, WHILE CONNOR McDAVID FALLS AGAIN
Winning two straight Stanley Cups is sublime in Florida, but McDavid has crashed both times — he is not yet an all-time player and must win the Finals before he’s compared to Gretzky and Crosby
The temperature is 91. Winds are mild. Humidity could reach 86 percent. Storms and thunder might be coming, but why would Matthew Tkachuk and Brad Marchand care if they are half-naked, always possible? The Everglades allows access to hockey fans, on designated trails, and if Amerant Bank Arena is a few yards away, throw a Stanley Cup championship party in the freshwater marshland.
To celebrate twice in one year — northwest of Miami and west of Fort Lauderdale, places where ice doesn’t exist — means the Florida Panthers are a potential dynasty. They are led by Paul Maurice, a sarcastic gent who has lost more NHL games than any other coach but now might be sitting on a three-title run in beautiful Sunrise. And they are operated by general manager Bill Zito, who pulled off an all-time deadline deal for Marchand. Acquiring players isn’t about Florida’s tax benefits.
“They know if the chicken isn’t right, then we’re going to get new chicken,” Zito said.
Without the GM, the Panthers would have perished in Game 7 against Toronto. He acquired Marchand, who made history with six goals in the Final, and defenseman Seth Jones. They eliminated Edmonton — and Connor McDavid, ladies and gentlemen — with a 5-1 victory in Game 6, after which trademark plastic rats were tossed into the bash. “On the ice, they’ve been shall I say, as advertised,” Zito said.
Let them jam in the ecosystem while McDavid wonders if he’ll ever win. He has been described as the best player on Earth, among the greatest of all time, but he managed only one goal in six games. Last season, the Oilers lost in seven games. They are headed backwards, failing as a Canadian city for the 32nd straight time. How will America ever acquaint itself with a superstar who can’t win?
“We lost to a really good team. Nobody quit. Nobody threw the towel in,” McDavid said. “They are a heck of a team, back-to-back champions for a reason. They tilted the ring and stayed on top of us. We never generated momentum off the ice. We kept trying the same thing, over and over again. We kept saying we were going to win 2-1. They are as deep as they come. Chasing again.”
There will be no comparisons to Wayne Gretzky, who won four times in the same town, or Sidney Crosby, who won three times in Pittsburgh. McDavid’s partner, Leon Draisaitl, scored big goals in the series. Was the captain, at 28, swallowed by Jaws? The day before the clincher, he was questioned about pressure. “That’s a pretty heavy question,” McDavid said. “I don’t think about it that way. If you think about it that way, you’d be probably pretty crippled in terms of how you prepare and how you play.”
The Cup was in the building, but he watched the Panthers carry it again. In the area, Dan Marino is a major sports fan but never won a Super Bowl. McDavid does not want to be Marino. He can’t expect the Oilers to keep advancing in a Western Conference that includes Las Vegas, Colorado, Winnipeg and Dallas.
Might he look to play another city? At some point?
“We believed. We came up just short again,” he said. “They were really good. You don’t think?”
So here’s to Marchand, who needed a reset from Boston to establish himself as a Hall of Fame player. And here’s to Sam Reinhart, who scored four goals Tuesday night. And here’s to Tkachuk, a badass. And here’s to Sam Bennett, who scored 15 playoff goals and won the Conn Smythe Trophy. And here’s to captain Aleksander Barkov. And here’s to goalie Sergei Bobrovsky — known as Playoff Bob, what else?
“It’s such an incredible group. Everybody wrote us off,” Marchand said. “Everyone was burying us. We knew we had the fire. It’s such an incredible culture. It feels like we’ve been here a lot longer than a few months.”
“Glory to the Father,” Bobrovsky said. “I am so privileged to be their goalie.”
“This one’s more rewarding to me,” said Tkachuk, who overcame injuries.
There was NHL commissioner Gary Bettman, saluting the fans. “The Stanley Cup is the most iconic trophy in sports and the most difficult to win,” he said. “To do it twice in a row is almost impossible. You fans have proven hockey works in the sunshine.”
Most of all, salute the general manager and the coach.
“I don’t think he’s changed since winning,” Bennett said of Maurice. “He’s the same. He can be hard on us. He’s hard on us when he needs to be, and then he’s relaxed with us when he knows that we need to, so I think he really does have a good feel for what our team needs. We all have the utmost respect for him. He really has control of this team. The team really has just bought into the culture that he’s implemented.”
Coaches don’t last long in the NHL. Finally, after leading four other teams, he can slip-slide headfirst into the Everglades. “If you walk into the room and you just tell the truth, whether they want to hear it or not but it’s the truth — and over time you could look back and say, ‘What that person told me was the truth,’ you’ll have respect for that,” Maurice said. “So, I work hard at trying to find the truth every day and then just telling it as simply as I can with the occasional joke slipped in. Most times I’m the only one that thinks it’s funny.”
He and his team were worth watching. TNT averaged only 2.5 million viewers in the first five games, far short of ESPN and ABC last June. Canada watched, of course. The tariffs were better news.
Connor McDavid would agree.
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Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.