Good morning, I’m Dan Gartland. I’m going on vacation for a little while. Tyler Lauletta will have you covered while I’m gone.
In today’s SI:AM: 🐀 Panthers repeat 🏀 Cooper Flagg’s first SI cover ⚽ Full EPL schedule
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Florida is still the capital of the hockey universe
For the second year in a row, the Florida Panthers are Stanley Cup champions.
The Panthers beat the Edmonton Oilers in Game 6 on Tuesday, 5–1, becoming the third NHL team in the past 25 years to win back-to-back championships.
The hero for Florida was Sam Reinhart, who scored four goals (two of them on an empty net) to become the fourth player in NHL history and first since 1957 to have a four-goal game in the Stanley Cup Final. On the other end, Panthers goalie Sergei Bobrovsky stood tall and stopped 28 of the 29 shots he faced and didn’t allow a goal until the final five minutes of the game, when Florida had already built a five-goal lead.
But neither of those two guys was awarded the Conn Smythe trophy as the MVP of the playoffs. That honor went to Florida’s Sam Bennett, who led the NHL with 15 goals this postseason, including five in the Final.
The Panthers’ offense led the way in this series. After scoring 18 goals in the seven-game Final last year against Edmonton, Florida had 28 goals in six games this year and scored at least five goals in each of the four games it won in the series. Give the Panthers credit for peppering the Oilers with plenty of shots (an impressive 31.5 per game, compared to 25.3 per game in last year’s series), but a big part of Edmonton’s problems was the inability of its goalies to stop those shots.
Stuart Skinner, the Oilers’ primary netminder, had a measly .861 save percentage in the series. In Game 4 last week, Skinner allowed three goals on 17 shots in the first period and was pulled at the start of the second in favor of Calvin Pickard. Pickard went on to stop 22 of the 23 shots he faced as Edmonton came from behind to win in overtime. Oilers coach Kris Knoblauch gave Pickard the starting nod in Game 5, but he surrendered four goals on 18 shots (a lousy .778 save percentage) in a loss that pushed Edmonton to the brink of elimination.
Skinner was back between the pipes for Game 6, and he wasn’t particularly sharp. The first two goals he allowed would have been tough to stop for anybody. The first came when Reinhart fired a hard shot past Skinner's glove, following a turnover at the blue line. Matthew Tkachuk scored the second on a shot that Skinner struggled to see due to a screen by Anton Lundell.
Florida’s third goal, though, was one that Skinner can be blamed for and the one that really crushed Edmonton’s hopes of a comeback. With the Panthers having established possession in the offensive zone, Skinner nonchalantly redirected a shot off his shoulder directly toward an open Aleksander Barkov. Barkov then threw the puck back toward the net and it bounced off Reinhart’s skate to give Florida a 3–0 lead with 2:29 left in the second period. After engineering multiple comebacks earlier in the series, Edmonton was unable to make anything happen in the third period. The Oilers were forced to pull their goalie with seven minutes left and proceeded to allow two empty-netters.
“Never really able to generate any momentum up the ice,” Oilers star Connor McDavid said. “We kept trying the same thing over and over again, banging our heads against the wall.”
It won’t be any consolation for the Oilers, but few teams have been able to figure out the Panthers in recent years. Not only did they win the Cup last year, but they also reached the Final in 2023, losing to the Vegas Golden Knights in five games. Can they get back here, though? Much of the team’s core remains under contract for the foreseeable future. Barkov, Tkachuk, Reinhart, Lundell and Carter Verhaeghe are all signed through at least 2030. The same goes for defensemen Seth Jones and Gustav Forsling. Bobrovsky, who will be 37 at the start of next season, has one more year left on his deal. But a couple of key players are set to hit the open market, most notably Bennett and long-tenured defenseman Aaron Ekblad. Trade deadline acquisition Brad Marchand, who turned back the clock at age 37 and scored 10 goals in the postseason, will also be a free agent. But with a strong core of young players still intact, it’d be foolish to rule out the possibility that the Panthers could become the first team in more than 40 years to reach four straight Finals.
The best of Sports Illustrated
- Cooper Flagg lands on the cover of the latest issue of Sports Illustrated, with a cover story by Chris Mannix on how Flagg is preparing to rule the NBA like he has every other level of basketball.
- Tom Verducci broke down what Shohei Ohtani did differently in his abbreviated return to the mound on Monday night.
- Tyrese Haliburton will undergo an MRI on his injured calf before Game 6 of the NBA Finals on Thursday.
- The full 2025–26 English Premier League schedule has been released.
- Caitlin Clark was at the center of a chippy game against the Sun, taking a hit to the eye from Jacy Sheldon that sparked a scuffle and multiple fouls, then later drilling a deep three over Sheldon and jawing at the bench in a fiery response.
- In the latest installment of 32 Teams in 32 Days, Gilberto Manzano examines how the Miami Dolphins appear to be heading into the season in rebuild mode.
- The NFL has canceled this year’s accelerator program to “reimagine” and merge it ahead of a revamped 2026 relaunch—aimed at improving its impact on promoting diversity in hiring—following limited placement success and mixed feedback, writes Gilberto Manzano.
The top five…
… things I saw last night:
5. The Panthers’ celebration as the horn sounded on their second straight championship.
4. Addison Barger’s walk-off homer for the Blue Jays.
3. Byron Buxton’s home run robbery in the bottom of the second, followed by a home run of his own in the top of the third.
2. Caitlin Clark’s dagger three, followed by some serious trash talk.
1. This Reds fan’s extremely nonchalant home run catch.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as SI:AM | Panthers Make It Back-to-Back Stanley Cups as Sam Reinhart Makes History.