The Florida Panthers Are Trying to Be the Rarest Type of Repeat Stanley Cup Finalist
Only 13 percent of back-to-back Finalists have done what Florida is aiming for.
Just one year ago, the Florida Panthers were among the greatest Cinderella stories in NHL playoff history. They went from the last team to qualify for the postseason field to the architects of one of the most shocking upsets ever — beating the record-breaking Boston Bruins in Round 1 — and eventually went all the way to the Stanley Cup Finals before losing to the Vegas Golden Knights.
This season, the Panthers are back in the Stanley Cup Finals. But they are far from a Cinderella: They’ve actually been one of the NHL’s top teams for most of the season. It’s that odd juxtaposition of expectations, if not results, that makes this Florida team so fascinating. And it might also end up being what makes them one of the rarest kinds of back-to-back Cup Finalists the game has to offer.
Consecutive trips to the Finals are fairly uncommon in recent decades. While 69 teams — including the 2024 Panthers — have played for the Cup in back-to-back seasons all-time, just 27 of those (or 39 percent) have happened since the end of the Original Six era in 1967, and only 10 (14 percent) have come since Wayne Gretzky’s Edmonton Oilers dynasty ended in 1988. Here’s a list of all those teams:
1991 + ‘92 Pittsburgh Penguins
1997 + ‘98 Detroit Red Wings
1999 + ‘00 Dallas Stars
2000 + ‘01 New Jersey Devils
2008 + ‘09 Pittsburgh Penguins
2008 + ‘09 Detroit Red Wings
2016 + ‘17 Pittsburgh Penguins
2020 + ‘21 Tampa Bay Lightning
2021 + ‘22 Tampa Bay Lightning
2023 + ‘24 Florida Panthers
Just by mere fact of going to the Finals in consecutive seasons, the Panthers have already pulled off a feat that only tends to happen roughly once every 4 years in modern times. But the way Florida has done it is also quite uncommon.
As I mentioned above, the Panthers lost the Finals to Vegas last year. This automatically made them much less likely to go back to the championship round than if they’d won the Cup a year ago.
Of the 68 all-time teams who made consecutive Finals appearances before this year, about two-thirds (66 percent) of them did it coming off of a Stanley Cup win, if not multiple wins as part of a dynasty. It’s far more infrequent to see a team lose the Finals, then come back and make another run the following season. We’ve only seen that particular style of back-to-back bids happen seven times since the Original Six era ended:
1967 + ‘68 Montreal Canadiens (lost, then won)
1968 + ‘69 St. Louis Blues (lost, then lost)
1969 + ‘70 St. Louis Blues (lost, then lost again)
1977 + ‘78 Boston Bruins (lost, then lost)
1983 + ‘84 Edmonton Oilers (lost, then won)
2008 + ‘09 Pittsburgh Penguins (lost, then won)
2023 + ‘24 Florida Panthers (lost, then ???)
Those teams are evenly split in terms of how often the returning Finals loser ended up avenging their loss. But overall, 61% of all-time teams who lost the first leg of back-to-back Finals trips ended up losing the second time around as well.
This makes what Florida is trying to do — making consecutive Finals trips with a loss followed by a win — the rarest combination of outcomes for a team that plays for the Cup in back-to-back years:
There is at least one positive factor on Florida’s side, however.
Remember how the Panthers went from a Cinderella last season to a favorite this year? If we look at Hockey-Reference’s Simple Rating System (SRS) metric, which simply represents a team’s schedule-adjusted goals-per-game differential during the regular season, Florida went from 14th with an SRS of +0.24 in 2022-23 to No. 1 in the entire league with a +0.81 SRS in 2023-24. Among all-time teams who went to the Finals in consecutive seasons, that 0.57-SRS improvement year-over-year ranks 9th-best — and it ranks 4th-best among teams who lost the Finals the first time around:
The bad news is that, for the majority of teams on our most-improved list, the upgrades didn’t matter — they lost again anyway. But Florida might be different. This time around, they will go into the Stanley Cup Finals as the best team in hockey — as well as the one with the most impressive combination of offense, defense, goaltending, physicality and depth.
It might be hard to lose the championship and then climb your way back to the mountaintop, but the Panthers already have that part taken care of. Now the only thing left is for Florida to prove they are better than they were this time last year — something that seems pretty apparent from watching them navigate the playoffs to this point.
Filed under: NHL
A dose of more uniqueness - this Cup Final will supposedly be the furthest between two cities in NHL history.