It’s rare to feel like you’re watching history unfold from the sidelines, but that’s exactly what’s happening in this Stanley Cup Final.
Game 6 on Friday night, when the Oilers beat the Panthers 5-1 at home to bring the series back to South Florida, wasn’t a testament to Connor McDavid’s performance, but Game 7 on Monday surely will be. This is legend writing, and the pen is in McDavid’s hand.
After scoring eight points in his previous two games, No. 97 failed to score a single point in Game 6 as Warren Vogel, Adam Henrique and Zach Hyman provided the Oilers with some much-needed goals and Ryan McLeod and Darnell Nurse added empty-netters. McDavid didn’t even get a shot on net on this fairytale night in Edmonton.
But McDavid, the presumed favorite to win the Conn Smythe Trophy no matter what happens Monday, is the greatest player of his generation and has a chance to lead his team to something no team has accomplished in the modern era of the sport.
McDavid’s 42 points with one game remaining ranks him behind Mario Lemieux and Wayne Gretzky on the all-time scoring list, and if the Oilers can overcome a 3-0 series deficit with another win on Monday in Sunrise, Fla., it’s hard to imagine how much it would mean to McDavid’s history and to the sports world as a whole.
He’s been driving the bus here, and as if we needed any further confirmation, he was among Edmonton’s leaders in just about every analytical metric on Friday. But the expected goals numbers don’t tell this story.
To understand what this means, just look at the scene around Rogers Place on Friday night. Read about McDavid’s connection to young Ben Stelter, who had glioma and was friends with McDavid before he died in August 2022. Understand that this is spiritual for a city that hasn’t won a Cup since 1990 and whose only attraction is the Oilers. Understand that this is happening in the most incredible way imaginable, that it’s unlikely anything like this will happen again in anyone’s lifetime, and that McDavid is the talisman of all this.
The last team to overturn a 3-0 deficit to win the Stanley Cup Final was the Maple Leafs in 1942. This remains the only time a team has ever accomplished this in a championship series in a major sport.
“Honestly, we’re just having fun,” McDavid told Sportsnet after the game. “We really believe. We believe in each other, we believe in this team and we’re having fun.”
Panthers coach Paul Maurice said before Game 6 that the pressure had shifted to the Oilers because their path to the Stanley Cup was now clearer, but within the first 20 minutes of Friday night’s game, those words were proven completely false.
Florida played with the weight of the world on its shoulders. Any physical advantage the Panthers had shown against the Rangers in the conference finals and the first three games of this series had completely disappeared. Maurice lost his cool when a second-period goal was called back because Sam Reinhart was offside. It was the kind of blunder that goes against your team when everything else is going against you.
The Oilers were riding the coattails of their home crowd, they had some in-form goaltending, with Stuart Skinner making 20 saves and dominating a suddenly weak Sergei Bobrovsky, and they had a dominant penalty kill throughout the playoffs. So you can imagine how the Oilers were feeling.
“This is what we’ve all been playing our whole lives,” forward Ryan Nugent-Hopkins told reporters. “To have this opportunity … to be in this position is a dream come true.”
The Panthers won’t lose easily on Monday. The Oilers will need McDavid to come out there like the best player in the world. They’ll also need Leon Draisaitl to step up after not scoring in the first six games of the series. Getting Voegele to jump out and score the first goal on Friday was a good start, though. All the elements that make this moment special also create a lot of pressure to get the job done.
“Who you are tonight has nothing to do with who you will be in two days,” Maurice said.
There’s an emotional side to it, and there’s also a financial side to it.
American broadcasters were reluctant to embrace the Oilers as a national favorite — ESPN in particular didn’t have staff on-site to cover the second-round match between Canadian teams Edmonton and Vancouver — and there was understandable frustration with a Stanley Cup final between two smaller markets.
Regardless of what happens on Monday, if the league can’t sell McDavid and the Oilers to Americans now, and if broadcasters are still unwilling to ride their broadcasts all the way to northern Alberta, they should fire their marketing team.
This series has produced one of the best stories in sports right now — the best storyline the NHL has had in a long time — and McDavid is the perfect player to write its conclusion.
