The NHL is about to stage a really non-traditional pair of convention finals. Every sport will likely be performed within the Sun Belt for the primary time, with not an Original Six franchise in sight.
“It’s the four best teams left. It doesn’t matter where they’re from, right?,” Vegas coach Bruce Cassidy mentioned Tuesday. “There’s that old tradition, the Original Six and someone’s usually there, but that’s just the way it falls this year.”
Carolina will tackle the Florida Panthers within the East remaining, with Game 1 on Thursday night time. The Dallas Stars and the Golden Knights open the West remaining Friday night time in Las Vegas.
“It’s a lot more fun. It’s a lot more of a party, it really is,” first-year Dallas coach Pete DeBoer mentioned. “The traditional markets, you go to a game, and I’m Canadian, but you go to a game in Toronto … it’s very reserved, very corporate. You come to these games, it’s a party, and Vegas is the same.”
DeBoer, who was Cassidy’s predecessor in Vegas and likewise coached at Florida, believes this type of remaining 4 is precisely what Commissioner Gary Bettman predicted when the NHL instituted a wage cap in 2005 after a yearlong lockout and made parity a precedence.
“It’s fantastic. … If you’re one of the 16 (playoff) teams, everyone feels like they have a chance to win the Stanley Cup if you’re one of those teams,” mentioned DeBoer, who’s in a convention remaining along with his fourth completely different crew. “That’s not the same in every sport. I think there’s some preconceived notions about the two or three teams that are going to be left standing at the end of the day in some of the other major sports. And it’s usually accurate every year.”
Even with Sun Belt groups filling each spot within the convention finals for the primary time, this quartet isn’t new to the playoffs. All have made it to a Stanley Cup Final, with Dallas profitable all of it in 1999 and Carolina the 2006 championship.
The Stars have gone to 2 different Stanley Cup finals for the reason that franchise moved south from Minnesota in 1993, the identical 12 months the enlargement Panthers got here into the league. The Hartford Whalers moved to Carolina and have become the Panthers in 1997. Vegas is in solely its sixth 12 months as a franchise, making the Stanley Cup Final in its inaugural enlargement season and lacking the playoffs solely as soon as since.
When the Stars misplaced to Tampa Bay in six video games in 2020, it was the “southernmost” Stanley Cup Final – anticipate that whole postseason was performed in Canada after the common season was interrupted and shortened due to the pandemic. That was the second of the Lightning’s three Cup titles.
Carolina is within the playoffs for the fifth straight 12 months and again within the East remaining for the primary time since 2019. The Hurricanes completed with the league’s second-best document behind Boston and maintain home-ice benefit for the remainder of the postseason.
It’s been a giant few months for the franchise, which hosted its first Stadium Series sport in February and drew a sellout crowd of almost 57,000 throughout the road from its PNC Arena residence at North Carolina State’s soccer stadium in Raleigh.
That’s been half of a bigger pattern of so-called non-traditional markets drawing marquee league occasions similar to outside video games to Nashville and Dallas — a crowd of 85,630 was readily available at Cotton Bowl Stadium when the Stars hosted the Predators on New Year’s Day 2020. Florida hosted this 12 months’s All-Star Game and subsequent month’s draft is in Nashville.
“I think it says a lot about how the game is growing, No. 1, and where’ve brought it to places and fans that never would have probably thought it 20 years ago or 30 or whatever,” Carolina coach Rod Brind’Amour mentioned. “You wouldn’t envision this happening.”
It’s a very thrilling time in South Florida, with the NBA’s Miami Heat within the convention finals together with the Panthers. Both took comparable paths this season – struggles within the common season, a late-season rally simply to get into the playoffs, ousting No. 1 total seeds within the first spherical and now peaking on the proper time.
Miami was a soccer market eternally, till the Heat began profitable. But with sold-out crowds and curiosity at an all-time excessive, the Panthers – who made the Stanley Cup Final in 1996, their third season after being an enlargement crew — really consider they’ve carved out sufficient help to say their space is a hockey city now as properly.
“The whole playoffs, it’s been amazing,” Florida captain Aleksander Barkov mentioned. “The past few years here, hockey has been growing and so has the interest in this organization and team. Obviously, the results (help) – we’ve been in the playoffs for the past couple years and that makes a big difference, too. The crowd supports us here and that gives us an extra boost.”
Content Source: www.washingtontimes.com