Why The Golden Knights — Or Panthers! — Can Win The Stanley Cup

Making the championship case for both teams.

Though it’s not the Stanley Cup Final we were expecting, the Florida Panthers and Vegas Golden Knights will face off for the NHL championship starting on Saturday, in what should be a really entertaining matchup. So just like we did before the conference finals, let’s preview the series and look at a handful of reasons why both Vegas and Florida can (or can’t) win the Cup.

♞ Vegas is clearly the better team on paper. I may have expressed doubt about the Golden Knights relative to other top-tier contenders, but there’s no question they have a better overall track record than the Panthers do. They had 19 more points in the regular-season standings, a goal differential more than twice as good relative to the league (+43 versus +17), a plainly superior SRS (+0.49 versus +0.24) and carry the higher Elo rating (1586 versus 1572) despite all of the upset wins and shocking sweeps the Panthers have pulled off.

Even if we only look at the playoffs, Vegas owns the better goals-per-game differential than Florida (+1.00 versus +0.44) and has been better compared with the league average on both offense and defense. There just isn’t much way to spin the big-picture résumé conversation in favor of the Panthers here.

Yeah, but…

🐆 Florida has mastered the art of the upset. According to the SRS-based logistic regression method I’ve used before to calculate postseason series win probabilities, the Panthers are on one of the most upset-tastic runs in modern NHL playoff history. Across the three rounds leading up to the Final, they’ve added +2.11 extra series wins compared with what their probabilities would expect. That ranks second among all Finalists since 1987 (the first year every NHL playoff series was best-of-seven), trailing only the Cinderella 2021 Montreal Canadiens:

Granted, almost all of the historical teams on that list (14 of 19) ended up seeing their magic run out in the Final itself. But still, the Panthers are one of the better teams by SRS to go on one of these types of runs, and they’ve done it while beating a variety of different types of strong teams — the Bruins, the Maple Leafs, the Hurricanes — en route to an impressive 12-4 postseason record. It’s not like Florida has been going 7 games (or even close to it) in most of these series.

Yeah, but…

⚔️ Vegas can match Florida’s hot-goalie secret sauce. Maybe the biggest key for the Panthers in engineering all of those upsets has been their edge with the unpredictably brilliant Sergei Bobrovsky in net. Bobrovsky leads all goaltenders in goals saved above average (GSAA) during the playoffs, and he badly outdueled Frederik Andersen and Ilya Samsonov in particular during Florida’s two most recent series. If goaltending is the most important strength a Cup-winning team can have, Florida seems set based on Bobrovsky’s current form.

However, the Golden Knights can answer with a standout goaltender of their own in Adin Hill. Hill ranks second behind Bobrovsky in GSAA during the playoffs, and his postseason save percentage is actually even higher than Bobrovsky’s (.937 versus .935). Hill’s success in net might also be more sustainable: While he was not Vegas’ primary goalie during the regular season — that was Logan Thompson, who remains day-to-day with an injury — Hill started 25 games, had a SV% 12 percent better than league average and helped give the Knights one of the league’s best goaltending time-shares. Bobrovsky, meanwhile, had a SV% 3 percent worse than league average and ranked third on his own team in GSAA. If any goalie in this matchup seems primed to turn into a pumpkin overnight, he probably wears a Florida uniform, not a Vegas one.

Yeah, but…

🌴 The Panthers have the edge in star power. One of the weird things about Vegas this season is that their stars didn’t really play like stars for most of the year. Jack Eichel led the roster in adjusted Goals Above Replacement during the regular season with just 14.3, which I’ve noted would be the lowest team-leading figure for a Cup winner since Dave Keon’s 8.6 led the 1966-67 Maple Leafs (a very strange champ that was outscored by 11 goals during the regular season). Eichel has been more impressive in the playoffs — notching 18 points in 17 games — but the story of this Vegas team is top-to-bottom team depth, as evidenced by seven different players producing 10+ points so far. (Who had Jonathan Marchessault on their bingo card to score 4 goals and 7 points in the West final — or William Karlsson to score 5 goals, for that matter?)

Florida, though, has the superior individual talent at a number of positions. Three different Panthers — LW Matthew Tkachuk, D Brandon Montour and C Carter Verhaeghe — would have led the Golden Knights in GAR during the regular season, and Tkachuk has created 15% more total goals than anybody on Vegas during the playoffs. (He almost single-handedly dispatched the Hurricanes with 3 game-winning goals in that series’ 4 contests.) If we also give Florida credit for Bobrovsky being the top goalie of the postseason to date, you could make a compelling case that the Panthers have the best overall player of this series in Tkachuk, plus the best goalie, best defenseman and multiple of the best forwards that will take the ice.

Yeah, but…

🎰 Vegas’ all-around team game is stronger. As another note on their exceptional depth, the Golden Knights have had four different players lead or co-lead them in scoring in the first three rounds of the playoffs: Chandler Stephenson and Mark Stone tied in Round 1 vs. the Jets, Eichel led in Round 2 vs. the Oilers and Marchessault led in Round 3 vs. the Stars. If the playoffs are about heroes crawling out of the woodwork — and in many ways, that’s true — the Golden Knights have more potential protagonists than anybody.

And that overall roster quality also shows up in how good Vegas has been at both ends of the ice during the playoffs. Their offense is outscoring Florida (3.65 goals per game to 3.13) and their defense is allowing fewer goals (2.65 versus 2.69). Moreover, if we try to strip away score effects and luck, Vegas is easily producing more expected goals at 5-on-5 with the score close while also allowing fewer of those.

So who’s gonna win??

I’m going with the Golden Knights. It’s far from a lopsided matchup — the Elo ratings set Vegas as a solid but hardly overwhelming 57% favorite — and there are reasons to think Florida can orchestrate another upset to finish off the ultimate underdog postseason. But there are more ways to envision the Knights overwhelming the Panthers with their depth and short-circuiting some of the more unsustainable aspects of Florida’s surprising run. And either way, after improving their weaknesses and retaining their strengths, both of these teams are worthy championship candidates. It’s going to be fun to see which continues that process of self-improvement on the sport’s biggest stage.

Filed under: NHL