Panthers find right balance between defending, scoring in Stanley Cup Final vs. Oilers

The Edmonton Oilers are in Florida for a must-win Game 6 in the Stanley Cup Final vs. the Panthers.

They’re National Hockey League snipers in their own right.

And while Aleksander Barkov and Sam Reinhart have yet to win league scoring titles, they’re key players in the Stanley Cup Final effort this year in shutting down – or at least limiting – two men who have claimed Art Ross hardware in recent years as top NHL points-getters.

To be clear, Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl have been the chief factors – as usual – in the Edmonton Oilers’ two wins over the Florida Panthers this June.

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McDavid, a five-time Art Ross winner, has seven points in the five Stanley Cup Final games so far and Draisaitl, the NHL’s top goal-scorer this season and its 2020 scoring leader, has eight.

The problem for McDavid, Draisaitl and the Oilers is, however, they’re facing elimination at the hands of a defending champion that’s been defending them like few teams have before.

“When we’re moving like we are, we’re supporting the puck both offensively and defensively. That’s when we’re at our best,” Reinhart told reporters after his team’s win Saturday. “We’ve talked about taking away their time and space, making them as uncomfortable as we possibly can, and that leads to a lot of our offence.

“That’s what our focus is.”

Case in point: Saturday’s Game 5, never mind Game 3, of this year’s Final.

McDavid was dangerous on Saturday, don’t get me wrong, but he had to work for his goal and his team-leading number of scoring chances in the 5-2 Oilers loss that has put the Panthers on the verge of repeating as Cup champs.

That’s because he and his line, as well as Draisaitl and his, are usually matched on the ice with Barkov, Reinhart and Carter Verhaege, the Panthers’ top forward unit.

Keep in mind Barkov is a three-time winner, including this season and last, of the league’s Selke award as its top defensive forward. And the Florida captain is a scoring threat as well, with three 80-plus point seasons over his 12-year NHL career.

Reinhart, too, has scored 80 or more points three times and just last season recorded 57 goals. Five-year veteran Verhaege can also tickle the twine with the best of them, 34- and 42-goal seasons on his young resume.

And their and their teammates’ air-tight defensive and forechecking efforts allowed them not only to give McDavid, with the aforementioned Game 5 goal, and Draisaitl, who went without a point Saturday, little time and space to make magic, but to jump on even the slightest Oiler mistake and make something out of it.

“Their whole team defends really well,” McDavid told media Monday in Sunrise, Fla., a day before Tuesday’s do-or-die Game 6. “Whether you’re out there against Barkov or anybody else, it’s difficult. They play a really solid brand of hockey.

“If you do manage to get through Barkov and their forwards, then they’ve got (Gustav) Forsling, Aaron) Ekblad, (and Seth) Jones back there (on defence), and they’ve got a pretty good goalie (Sergei Bobrovsky) as well.”

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And getting this version of the Panthers to this place of complete team defence coupled with lethal scoring threats – I haven’t even typed the names Sam Bennett (15 goals these playoffs, five of them against the Oilers), Brad Marchand (six goals in the Cup Final) or Matthew Tkachuk yet, never mind Barkovs-in-the-making Anton Lundell and Eetu Luostarinen – has only just been realized now, Panthers head coach Paul Maurice said Saturday after the Florida win.

Which is saying something because, again, they’re the defending champs.

“We were close to our identity,” Maurice told media after Game 5, recalling when he took over the bench for the 2022-23 NHL season, a campaign in which they made an improbable run to the Cup Final only to lose to the Vegas Golden Knights.

He said the identity he was trying to establish – an air-tight defensive mindset while maintaining its already dynamic offence – was “a hard thing to get to.”

“It’s solely based on the will of the players to play a game, and (now) we’ve had a little bit of success with it, so why wouldn’t they, right?” Maurice mused with the media. “It took longer than we thought, probably because I was trying to marry two ideas, just trying to keep whatever we had … the year before (a league-leading 340 goals in 2021-22 and transplant it inside) another (style of) game.

“I’m not trying to be humble here. This is all about the compete of the players. When the captain of your team wins Selke awards, that’s the foundation of your game.”

Reinhart said the Panthers have kept in mind the task at hand – shut McDavid, Draisaitl and the Oilers down and cash in on chances to score – since the start.

“It’s a team effort defending guys like that. We’ve known all series the challenge is there for us,” Reinhart said.

“No one really cares in our locker-room who’s producing and when. It’s just a matter that someone is at the right times, and that’s what we’ve had.”