Originally posted on Daily Faceoff
With the Stanley Cup Final launching Saturday, we’ll lean into it with a Cup-themed Roundtable this week.
The Oilers are trying to halt the Canada Stanley Cup curse at 30 years. The Panthers are trying to win their first championship. So which team has more at stake in the Stanley Cup Final?
MATT LARKIN: I know the Oilers face the pressure of a Canadian market, but you can’t bet against Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl in any given year, so I could see them making it back to the Final next year. I think the Florida Panthers are under more pressure to win. If they lose in two consecutive Finals, getting there a third straight year will feel like a mountain to climb. They also have so much potential change looming for their roster, with the likes of Sam Reinhart and Brandon Montour headed for free agency. Even if the Panthers can keep their group together, it will cost a lot of money to do so. They currently have eight forwards without contracts for next season. It just feels like they need to make it count this time given the uncertainty for 2024-25 and beyond.
STEVEN ELLIS: This one’s easy for me: Florida Panthers. Like you said, Matt, losing two years in a row would be a tough pill to swallow, and only one team has made it to the final in three consecutive years in the salary cap era. They’ve got the tough task of making contracts for Reinhart and Montour work and Aaron Ekblad is a UFA next summer, too. How long will 35-year-old Sergei Bobrovsky be a top goalie, and is Spencer Knight capable of taking over after some false starts? This is a team that’s built to win now with a ton of key players in their prime. But beyond Aleksander Barkov, Matthew Tkachuk and Gustav Forsling, they don’t have many guys signed long-term. This feels like a must-win-at-all-costs for Florida.
SCOTT MAXWELL: The Florida Panthers may have a lot of questions up in the air with pending free agents, but I’d argue that they shouldn’t be nearly as worried because they have the hard part done. Barkov, Tkachuk and Forsling are the key parts of this organization going forward, and they have them all locked up long-term. The Edmonton Oilers aren’t as secure. Draisaitl and Evan Bouchard’s contracts are up next year, and McDavid is up the year after that, and they have no idea how much those three will take out of your salary cap going forward. Is there any risk of them leaving? Most likely not. But it’s hard to build out the rest of the team when you don’t have the main pieces locked in. Add in the fact that Stuart Skinner hasn’t proven to be the stable option in net just yet and that most of their other big pieces are either overpaid or over 30, and there’s just as much uncertainty with the Oilers as there is with the Panthers. I at least trust Bill Zito to make the right moves with the vacancies and cap space they’ll have this summer, especially after how he rebuilt their defense core in the wake of Ekblad’s and Montour’s injuries. On top of the roster uncertainty, the Eastern Conference has a lot of teams with closing windows or poor management, while the Western Conference has a lot of teams poised to contend for years to come. The Oilers will have a tough route to get back to the Final, whereas the Panthers’ path looks to be a bit easier at the moment.
FRANK SERAVALLI: Which team has more at stake? I think that’s a relatively easy question in that it’s the Edmonton Oilers. Scott hit it on the head that the Oilers probably need to make hay in one more year in which you have McDavid and Draisaitl, not to mention Bouchard, on relatively inexpensive contracts. McDavid has been surpassed as the highest paid player in the league. Draisaitl is on a bargain deal. And Bouchard is playing out his bridge. Right now, those three combine for $24.9 million against the cap. Pure spitballing here, but I think Draisaitl’s next deal starts with a $14 in front of six zeros. I think it’s easy to imagine McDavid north of that in the $16 million range. And I bet Bouchard’s next deal is eight figures following the bridge, so $10+ million. Let’s call that a total of $40 million between the three. Yes, the cap will be going up and by the first year of McDavid’s next deal, it should be in the $97-98 million range. But it’s still a big jump and just makes the pieces that much harder to fit together. The Panthers, on the other hand, this is going to sound funny, but I think this was actually their big transition year (no assets, no cap space) before they can build out their defense to be a little more balanced. Either way, the window isn’t closing for either team anytime soon, which makes this series even more fun.
MIKE GOULD: I agree with Scott and Frank. It feels like the stars have finally aligned for the Edmonton Oilers to make something happen in Year Nine of McDavid. To get this far only for it to fall apart would be nothing short of catastrophic. There’s no guarantee the Oilers ever have another playoff run come together with their current core quite like this one did. They’ve been dominant, no doubt, but they’ve also risen to the occasion every single time they were at risk of being dealt a major blow. They haven’t trailed a series by multiple games just yet, even though they came close against both Vancouver and Dallas. It’s been a little precarious for this Oilers team, and if they don’t win this year, I’m not sure everything will fall into place for them again like it has this time around.
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Originally posted on Daily Faceoff
Published: 3 months ago
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