Edmonton — Keith Yandle was picking up his 11-year-old daughter from a birthday party when children were instructed to dress up for the party and wear costumes of their favorite characters.
He hadn't expected what he found.
“Three of the girls had (Aleksander) Barkov jerseys on,” said Yandle, who settled in South Florida after playing five seasons with the Florida Panthers from 2016 to 2021. “They were excited about the game. They're 10, 11 years old, but they were excited about hockey and excited to have a winning team.”
This is a scene that would have been unimaginable 10 years ago.
The Panthers are a franchise that has struggled for attendance, attention and on-ice success over their 30 sometimes turbulent seasons in the NHL. Though they reached the Stanley Cup Final in their third season in 1995-96, they only made the Stanley Cup Playoffs in four of their next 22 seasons.
But over the past five years, the Panthers have made the playoffs every season, risen to be one of the NHL's top teams, won the Presidents Trophy in 2021-22, won a first-round playoff game for the first time since the 1995-96 season and reached the Stanley Cup Final each of the past two seasons.
The Panthers are one win away from the Stanley Cup, leading 3-0 in a best-of-seven final against the Edmonton Oilers, a franchise that has won the Cup five times in 44 seasons. And if the Panthers win one more game in their first chance at Rogers Place on Saturday (8 p.m. ET, ABC, ESPN+, CBC, TVAS, SN), they'll have their name etched on the Cup and their place in history.
Steve Goldstein, the Panthers' TV and radio play-by-play announcer and current TV announcer, has seen a lot in his 17 years with the club, but he's never seen anything like it in June, with busy days and nights, hockey fans showing up and non-hockey fans joining the party.
There's only one more step left.
So what would a Cup win mean for hockey in South Florida?
“It's going to explode,” Goldstein said.
* * * *
Hockey arrived in Florida in a hurry.
In 1992-93, the Tampa Bay Lightning played the first game, and in 1993-94, the Panthers joined.
Some teams had success in those early seasons, but more so the Panthers than the Lightning. Florida reached the Cup Final in Year 3, but lost in four games to the Colorado Avalanche. They never made the Finals again in the next 26 seasons, and rarely even made the postseason.
At the time, the Panthers played at Miami Arena, the raucous building where Scott Mellanby killed a rat by smashing it into the wall with a hockey stick, where the “rat tradition” was born when thousands of plastic rats were thrown onto the ice after goals and wins, and where the Panthers had their most successful playoff games.
“It's a passionate fan base,” said Bill Lindsay, who played for the Panthers for seven seasons, including their inaugural season and their first Stanley Cup final, and now serves as the team's radio commentator. “It was crazy in the early '90s. It was wild.”
In 1998, the Panthers opened a new arena in Sunrise, Florida, about 34 miles from Miami and 14 miles from Fort Lauderdale.
But the boom period ended and the franchise went into decline.
“During that time, we kept promising our fans that things would get better,” Lindsay said. “It was just so hard. We were changing players, coaches, general managers.”
But it all started when Vincent Viola bought the team in 2013. Coach Joel Quenneville was hired on April 8, 2019, and brought prestige and a winning tradition to what the Panthers were trying to build. (Quenneville, who resigned on October 28, 2021 following sexual assault allegations against the former Chicago Blackhawks video coach, is the second-winningest manager in NHL history with 969 wins.)
That was followed by the selection of general manager Bill Zito, who took over on Sept. 2, 2020, and he immediately set about strengthening the roster, remaking nearly the entire Panthers roster over the next three years.
“Very few playoff games were played in this building, much less won,” Goldstein said, “but once Joel Quenneville got here, things really started to pick up. The team scored a ton of goals, won games and had a great series against Tampa four years ago, which they lost in the first round.”
“That was the beginning. That's when hockey fans that were probably dormant started coming out. Over the last two years, all of those non-diegetic hockey fans are now participating in all of this.”
The Panthers are now on the brink of a title, on the brink of greatness, on the brink of legitimacy in some people's eyes.
“A lot of what I think we are an incredibly well-built franchise has been built up after suffering when things didn't go well,” said Panthers head coach Paul Maurice, who has the fourth-most wins in history (869) and took over on June 22, 2022. “Carolina, when we were in Greensboro, I think we had 1,200 people one night for our game against Calgary. And when you win and build a good program, you create an expanded fan base that doesn't necessarily fluctuate with wins and losses.”
“We've got to take our time and play some exciting hockey games, but we want to be a part of that and feel like we're part of building something that has roots that are deep enough that we're considered an exemplary franchise, and these runs are very important to that.”
