The Florida Panthers Are a Dynasty That Rose From a Sweep

Florida was once the NHL’s most irrelevant team. Now they’ve won two straight Cups — and showed the rest of the league how to bounce back from a humiliating Presidents’ Trophy flameout.

Aleksander Barkov of the Florida Panthers celebrates with the Stanley Cup after defeating the Edmonton Oilers in Game 6 of the 2025 Stanley Cup Final. (Bruce Bennett/Getty Images)

So that’s it, then! The Florida Panthers are officially, by any reasonable definition — multiple Cups in a short span, plus a third Finals trip — a hockey dynasty, having dispatched the Edmonton Oilers in Game 6 of the Stanley Cup Final to win their second consecutive championship (in their third straight Finals appearance).

Going back to 1927, when the NHL assumed full control over the Stanley Cup for its champion, only 18 teams have had a multi-year streak of consecutive titles — and the Panthers are now in that group:

But I already wrote about all the “dynasty” talk you probably wanted to read in Tuesday’s edition of the newsletter. What I wanted to cover today was how a team once synonymous with futility — a hockey punchline for most of its existence — could suddenly turn into a juggernaut out of seemingly nowhere. And whether the seeds for this run were actually planted in the humbling failure of their 2022 President’s Trophy season — a cautionary tale that may have secretly been a turning point for the franchise.