The Edmonton Oilers fell in Game 7 of the Stanley Cup playoffs on Monday, losing to the Florida Panthers 2-1 at Amerant Bank Arena in Sunrise, Fla.
It is the first Stanley Cup championship for the Panthers, who joined the NHL as an expansion franchise in 1993. They won it in their third trip to the final, after losing in 1996 to the Colorado Avalanche and last year to the Vegas Golden Knights.
The Oilers had clawed back from a 3-0 deficit in the best-of-seven series but were unable to complete the reverse sweep. Had they done so, they would have been only the second team in more than 100 years to win the Stanley Cup after losing the first three games.
The Toronto Maple Leafs of 1942 are the only team to accomplish it.
It was the first time Edmonton reached the final since 2006. It has claimed five Stanley Cup titles but none since 1990. No Canadian team has won one since the 1993 Montreal Canadiens.
In the moments after Florida’s players hugged on the ice. The coveted 36-pound trophy was presented to Aleksander Barkov, the Panthers’ captain, by NHL commissioner Gary Bettman. After that, players took turns skating around with it.
Connor McDavid, the Oilers’ captain, won the Conn Smythe Trophy given to the most valuable player during the playoffs. McDavid had eight goals and 42 points, and set the all-time assist record with 31 in the postseason.
He was so broken up he didn’t come out for the trophy to be awarded to him.
“He is the greatest player to ever play the game in my book,” his teammate, Leon Draisaitl, said. “He single-handed turned this franchise around.”
McDavid was the first player selected in the draft in 2015. He has won every award a player could but still no Stanley Cup. The Oilers were doormats until he came along. Two years ago they made it to the conference final, this year to the biggest dance in hockey of them all.
“I knew it was going to be a real tight game,” McDavid said. “It came down to a thing here or there. It is tough to be down 3-0 and it’s tough to win four in a row but we were right there.
“We never stopped believing. We thought we would get another goal near the end.”
Sam Reinhart, who had 57 goals during the regular season, got the winner for Florida on a long wrist shot that eluded Stuart Skinner. It was Reinhart’s 10th goal of the postseason and occurred with 4:49 left in the second period.
It helped Paul Maurice, the Panthers’ veteran head coach, win his first Stanley Cup as a bench boss in 26 years in the NHL. It came in Maurice’s 1,985th career NHL game, the most by any head coach before they won their first cup.
The game took place 258 days after the season’s opening face-off and in its 1,400th contest, with 36,210-plus kilometres travelled in the final, and after each team had claimed three straight victories.
The Panthers jumped on top less than five minutes in when Carter Verhaeghe deflected a shot through Skinner’s legs. It was Verhaeghe’s team-leading 11th goal of the playoffs.
Edmonton tied it at 1-1 with 13:16 to go on a wrist shot by Mattias Janmark that went over Sergei Bobrovsky. Janmark broke in on the net after a long stretch pass from Cody Ceci. It was Janmark’s fourth goal of the postseason.
The period ended with Florida holding an 8-6 advantage in shots on the net but the Panthers were pushing harder and the Oilers had difficulty getting them out of their defensive zone.
The Oilers outscored the Panthers 18-5 in the three previous elimination games but Bobrovsky was excellent in Game 7. He stopped 23 of 24 shots. Skinner had 19 saves in defeat.
Boston Pizza chain chairman Jim Treliving had promised this week to rename his restaurants Edmonton Pizza if the Oilers won the Stanley Cup. He also announced that he would give away 30,000 pizzas across the country on the day of the Oilers’ victory parade.
The victory parade will instead take place in South Florida for the first time.
“It’s a big game but at the end of the day the sun is going to come up tomorrow,” Mattias Ekholm, Edmonton’s veteran defenceman, said earlier in the day. “We all want to win it, no question, but there is going to be a team that loses tonight regardless of how the game goes.”
Edmonton players and coach Kris Knoblauch conducted postgame interviews and could hear the celebration out on the ice.
“We were one period, one shot away from winning it,” Draisaitl said. “Now we have to play 82 games next year to get a crack at it. It’s heartbreaking.”
It was Corey Perry’s fifth Stanley Cup final with a record five different teams. The 39-year-old Oiler has won just once.
“You dream of playing in a Game 7 and being the hero on a backyard rink,” Perry said earlier. “Now it’s a reality. Hopefully it is somebody in our dressing room. You can’t take it for granted. This could be the last chance in a Stanley Cup final for half of these guys. These things don’t come around very often.”
At the end players on both sides exchanged handshakes. Around them were rubber rats that had been tossed by fans onto the ice. It’s a Panthers tradition that dates back to the first season in the NHL, and now a piece of rodent history.
“We had overcome so many obstacles this season that there will be a lot of thinking about what happened tonight and what-ifs,” Knoblauch said. It will take a while to let go.”
