The Final Nail

A look back at the Stanley Cup Final

I’m late to discuss what happened in Game 6, so let’s do a quick recap.

This was a browbeating. Florida carried over their Game 5 showing to put an exclamation point on their second Cup win. Their goals came off some opportunistic situations (Reinhart off a turnover, Barkov off an awful Skinner rebound) but things like that happen when you carry the play to the degree that they did. Like the Hurricanes, some of the Oilers early sins in the series came back to haunt them later. Their puck movement out of their own zone only got worse and eventually it bled into their offense. Instead of getting seven or eight chances to do something off the rush a game they were only getting three or four. Mistakes were coming from the Oilers top players instead of the guys they tried to protect & the house of cards collapsed.

Top Players

This was an ideal game for the Panthers because their defense didn’t really need to do anything with the puck or play too aggressive. They could just clear it or move it to the next guy & get back into position. I will say it does undersell how good Gustav Forsling was when this series go to crunch time. He only had five exits with possession, but nine of his puck retrievals led to controlled exits by the Panthers & he didn’t have any failed breakouts. Aaron Ekblad was rocking a similar efficiency with no failed breakouts on 11 retrievals with 6 of them leading to exits. The Panthers forwards were doing a bulk of the legwork and this this ideal setup. Florida’s blue line wasn’t asked to do much but they can when they need to & it’s easier to plug-and-play guys when the forwards play as well as Florida did. It’s fitting that the Lundell line showed out this game because they were the main reason the Panthers won this series in this fashion.

As for McDavid, I want to do somewhat of a deep dive into his & Draisaitl’s series. He scored only one goal with seven points in the six games. Hard to say that he was awful in any game or that he didn’t show up, but he was coming off his best playoff run and ran into another trap door when facing Florida.

This was a little better than last season, but you can see the dropoff in both his scoring chance production and overall play when he runs into the Panthers, as he should because this is the Final after all. Even in the last two games, where I didn’t think he played particularly great by his standards, he had over 11 scoring chances per 60 minutes at five-on-five. It takes two to tango with generating chances and even though McDavid is the type of talent who can break structure open, doing it alone is tough and borderline possible when you’re this deep in the playoffs.

The Oilers go-to move when they’re pushing is loading up their stars on the top line with McDavid & Draisaitl, a move Knobloch went to fairly often because the Oilers were playing from behind so often, while glued to the right wing was Corey Perry. Digging into the numbers, something I found interesting was that McDavid & Draisaitl set eachother up for only four five-on-five shots combined (two a piece). They also didn’t combine for a goal at five-on-five with most of McDavid’s passes going to Bouchard (12) or Perry (3) while Draisaitl was primarily looking for Ekholm (6 passes). Meanwhile, McDavid himself was more of a shooter with 12 scoring chances on three shots with a pretty equal distribution of who was setting him up between Bouchard, Perry, Brown and Draisaitl). The lack of RNH sticks out here, but I do want to take a closer look at how McDavid was getting his offense & why Florida seems to be a brick wall for him.

Some common themes with McDavid’s puck touches, he was on his backhand for a lot of them (17 of his 29 controlled entries were down the right side), there is a lot of disruption from Florida’s defenders in all forms, whether it’s body contact, a defenseman laying out at just the right second or stickwork. There’s also not a lot of quick shots, as he’s trying to make a move or two and he didn’t exactly have much of a choice. Perry is also on the receiving end of hisbest setups here, which has some give-and-take to it. He scored three goals, but the Oilers other wingers either weren’t present or weren’t tried alongside McDavid. Jeff Skinner makes a brief appearance in one of the clips & that was at the end of a shift with Henrique coming on in McDavid’s spot.

The Oilers had done a good job of debunking the narrative that they’re a two-player team with paper wings, a slow defense and weak goaltending. The Panthers made them look like that by the time this series was halfway over. The loss of Zach Hyman looms large here, obviously, but there was a lot of try from the Oilers stars with the foundation crumbling from underneath them. Whenever they had a good game from one of their support guys, they could never follow it up. Nugent-Hopkins had one of his best games of the playoffs in Game 4 and two total shots the rest of the series. Evander Kane wasn’t much better with three shots and one scoring chance over the final three games, Podkolzin showed some spark in the latter stages but wasn’t on the ice enough to matter & Perry could only muster four scoring chance contributions in the final three games, which was best on the Oilers.

Across the ice, you had Barkov post a modest point total, but 15 chance contributions, which was 7th on the Panthers but would have been 2nd on the Oilers. Alongside him you had Sam Reinhart with 16, down the lineup was Brad Marchand with 22 chance contributions and Eetu Luostarinen with 18. The Panthers did kick it into high gear once the series got to Game 5, but you see the gap in the supporting casts for both teams. Not to put all the blame on Perry, but the Oilers doubled down on a pretty old supporting cast on their wings and the only players who gave them some jump in terms of chance creation were Podkolzin and Skinner (4 chances in about 50 minutes of ice time). There was a lot of Florida forcing McDavid to make the impossible happen and the rest of the roster was too slow or out of position to really do anything. Playing the give-and-go game with Bouchard had some success and then Florida eventually got to him too.

Overall Stats/Conn Smythe Watch

This was an interesting Conn Smythe watch for me. Ultimately they gave it to Bennett as the leading scorer in the playoffs, which is fine. The series itself I had divided into two different sections. The first four games were McDavid leading the pack overall with basically everyone from the Panthers top-six right behind him in Game Score. Marchand’s rush offense and goal production had him at the top, but you also had Carter Verhaeghe showing strong as a playmaker and the primary puck-carrier on his line. Bennett was also there from being the trigger-man on his line and his goal production. Barkov rated a little lower because he was letting his linemates do most of the work with the puck, Reinhart especially, but it’s easy to overlook his defensive play and the number of secondary shot assists he racks up from playing so strong along the walls & behind the goal line.

The final two games were all Panthers & you could pick whoever you wanted between Marchand, Reinhart, Bennett or Barkov as their best player. Lundell also had a fantastic finish to this series, but picking him as the Conn Smythe would be a tough sell. I do want to say that he was an interesting player with how much he “leveled up” in the playoffs. He played primarily a shutdown role in the regular season & didn’t have Marchand on his wing, but I expected him to rate better in the A3Z stats after how great his first couple of years were. He was their best forward in their first trip to the Cup Final, so the ability was always there with him & you saw some of that again in this year’s run. The jump in offense is still a little striking.

How they play the Bennett contract (and Ekblad to a lesser extent) is going to be very interesting. Part of what makes the Panthers such a nightmare is how insane their top-nine is and having your leading goal-scorer take up only $4.45 of your cap because you bought low on him four years ago is a major part of that. He has every right to ask for a the moon this summer and this run has him viewed as a unicorn type of player that every fan sick of their team losing in the playoffs wants. The succession plan is there for Florida with Lundell waiting to take the 2C spot, but there is a lot with Bennett that never gets talked about, namely how he seems to be the only one on Florida with the green light to carry the puck.

There’s a lot that he can offer a team looking to bolster their middle-six even if you ignore the physical part of his game. How much that’s worth to you depends on the buyer. Florida has the cap space to pay him but giving him the contract he supposedly will command goes against what they usually do. That said, they got Sam Reinhart for a cap hit under $9 mil. after he had a 50-goal season so I’m not sure how they’ll play this. I’m sure they want as many kicks at the can as possible before Sergey Bobrovsky enters the twilight of his career (and is due a new contract after next season that I’m sure will be at a discount if he sticks around).

Closing Thoughts

The parade of hot takes after this year were something. Sports can be a brutal business when it gets to crunch time. The flaws that you got by with for months come back to haunt you and show that you that the pinnacle is further away than you thought. The rest of the league gets better while you’re at your peak and you never know when you’re going to get another shot.

This is especially true for the Oilers who were far from a perfectly managed team. Yes, McDavid and Draisaitl’s combined cap hits give you less room for error when building out the rest of your roster, but there’s also the self-inflicted wound of having one or two of your off-season acquisitions sitting in the press box and $9.25 mil. of cap space on your third defense pair. They also made it this far despite Stuart Skinner having one of the worst save percentages of qualified goaltenders. The elite talent they had & more support guys showing up in the first three rounds made these flaws not as big of an issue until they fan into a superior team that they could hang with until they couldn’t.