And another long flight to Alberta awaits — with this Stanley Cup Final suddenly looking very tight.
The Panthers gave up two power-play goals and a shorthanded score, got into a 3-0 hole before trying to rally and wound up falling 5-3 to the Edmonton Oilers in Game 5 of the title series on Tuesday night. It was the second consecutive time Florida was thwarted in a chance to win the Cup, after an 8-1 embarrassment in Edmonton over the weekend.
Game 6 is there on Friday night.
“I’m not pumping tires. I’m not rubbing backs. I don’t think we need that at all,” Panthers coach Paul Maurice said. “Everybody feels probably exactly the way I do right now. I’m not feeling deflated. Neither’s the hockey team. They’re not feeling deflated. Little grumpy.”
Maybe a lot grumpy.
“We’re going to turn the page,” forward Evan Rodrigues said. “We’re going to learn from this one.”
Rodrigues and Matthew Tkachuk each had a goal and an assist for Florida, and Oliver Ekman-Larsson also scored for the Panthers. Sergei Bobrovsky stopped 19 shots for Florida, which will see its 30-years-and-counting wait for the franchise’s first Stanley Cup title last at least three more days.
“We get another crack at it on Friday,” Tkachuk said.
Connor McDavid had two goals and two assists to become the first player in NHL history to have back-to-back four-point games in the Stanley Cup Final, and Evan Bouchard added three assists for Edmonton. Connor Brown, Zach Hyman and Corey Perry also had goals for the Oilers while Stuart Skinner stopped 29 shots.
McDavid said it was a total team effort. It was, but it was also another superhuman effort from McDavid, the game’s best player who is doing things never before done in the title series.
The four points gave McDavid 42 in these playoffs, the fourth-most in a single postseason in NHL history. The only players ahead of him are the ones everyone would expect: Wayne Gretzky had 47 points in 1985, Mario Lemieux had 44 in 1991 and Gretzky had 43 in 1988.
McDavid will have at least one — and, he hopes, two — games to add to that total. If there is a Game 7, it’ll be in Sunrise on Monday night.
“Any time you’re in the same realm as those two, it’s always a good thing,” McDavid said.
It was the first time in Panthers history that they played a home game with a chance to win the Cup. Another sellout crowd came, some of the paying more than $1,000 apiece for tickets on the secondary market — the crowd pushing Florida’s total attendance for the season over 1 million for the first time.
They came to see the trophy.
The Oilers just wouldn’t let it happen. And when it was over, Tkachuk was asked if the Panthers feel the pressure.
“No. No. No,” Tkachuk said. “It’s not an elimination game for us. We’re going up there, we have a 3-2 series lead, just got to take care of business like we did in Game 3.”