‘We’ve got to be a dynasty now’: Matthew Tkachuk on Panthers’ second Stanley Cup, Connor McDavid’s future, and more

Is there a new dynasty in the Sunshine State?

With a 5-1 victory over the Edmonton Oilers in Game 6, the Florida Panthers captured their second Stanley Cup in as many years, becoming just the third team in the NHL’s salary cap era to win back-to-back championships.

The Pittsburgh Penguins won two Stanley Cups in 2015-16 and 2016-17, while the Tampa Bay Lightning came out on top during both of the pandemic-shortened seasons in 2019-20 and 2021. The Lightning and Panthers both reached the Cup Final three years in a row, the first time that’s happened since the Oilers did so in the early 1980s.

Another Stanley Cup by the Panthers next spring would make them just the fourth team in league history to win championships three seasons in a row. The last time it happened was when the New York Islanders won four consecutive Cups between 1980 and 1983. It would also match them with the Penguins and Chicago Blackhawks for most Cups in the cap era.

For Matthew Tkachuk, that’s enough to be in the dynasty conversation.

“We’ve got to be a dynasty now,” Tkachuk told Sportsnet’s Gene Principe after Game 6. “That’s three years in a row in the Finals, two championships. This team is so special. Stanley Cup champion. This never gets old.”

The most impressive thing about their second Stanley Cup victory is that the Panthers were better this time around.

After plowing through the Lightning in five games in the first round, the Panthers were taken to seven games by the Maple Leafs in the second. They went on the road in Game 7 and hammered Toronto by a score of 6-1 in the deciding game of the series. Florida then completed a gentleman’s sweep of the Carolina Hurricanes in the Eastern Conference Final, winning in five games.

Last year’s Stanley Cup saw the Panthers nearly blow a 3-0 series lead before edging out a tight victory in Game 7. This year, they split the first four games of the series with the Oilers before completely taking control in Games 5 and 6.

The Panthers were the away team in each series they played this year and picked up 10 of their 16 playoff wins on the road. Both of Edmonton’s wins against Florida came in overtime and they managed only one victory in three games at home.

Connor McDavid scored three goals and 11 points in last year’s Stanley Cup Final and became the sixth player to win the Conn Smythe Trophy in a losing effort. This year, the Panthers held McDavid to one goal and seven points in six games.

“Our team was a team,” Tkachuk said. “When things were getting hard for them, they looked to one guy. But our team, we do it collectively.

This is now the fourth year in a row that the Oilers have come up short against the eventual Stanley Cup champions. They fell to the Colorado Avalanche in the Western Conference Final in 2021-22, they lost to the Vegas Golden Knights in the second round in 2022-23, and they’ve now been dropped by the Panthers in back-to-back years.

It’s another tough loss for McDavid, who was hoping to be on the Wayne Gretzky and Sidney Crosby trajectory to his first Stanley Cup. Both Gretzky and Crosby fell in their first trips to the Cup Final and then came back the following year to beat the same team. McDavid and the Oilers got their rematch against the Panthers, but they couldn’t slay the beast.

Just about everyone in the hockey world expects that McDavid will eventually win the Stanley Cup, including his rivals on the Panthers. The question is whether it’ll come with Edmonton or not. It wasn’t until Tkachuk left the Calgary Flames, the team that selected him with the sixth overall pick in the 2016 draft, that he found success in the playoffs.

“When you have a player that good and that talented, he’s going to win (the Stanley Cup) one day. Wherever it is,” Tkachuk said.

McDavid has one more season left in the eight-year, $100 million contract he signed with the Oilers back in the summer of 2017. When that deal was signed, the Oilers had just ended a decade-long playoff drought and McDavid had just won his first Hart Trophy.

Since then, McDavid has earned a lot of individual hardware and he’s had success at the international level, but he hasn’t been able to capture the elusive Stanley Cup. The Oilers have built themselves up from a playoff hopeful into the team to beat in the Western Conference, but it hasn’t been enough to beat the Panthers.

Come July 1, McDavid will be able to sign a contract extension with the Oilers. Getting a deal done this summer would soothe Edmonton’s wounds from losing another Stanley Cup. The captain and best player in the league going into the 2025-26 season as a pending unrestricted free agent would be a daunting possibility.