Draisaitl’s redemption, cheap shots, and the biggest storylines to watch in the Stanley Cup Final

Anthony Trudeau
Anthony Trudeau(atrud00)
Jun 3, 2025, 14:00 EDT
Draisaitl’s redemption, cheap shots, and the biggest storylines to watch in the Stanley Cup Final
Credit: Sam Navarro-USA TODAY Sports

Of the 64 Stanley Cup Final matchups that were possible when the postseason started some six weeks ago, how many were better than this? There are so many angles to view this matchup from, each more intriguing than the last.

The defending champs versus the one team that troubled them last season. Connor McDavid, the straight-laced centerpiece of Team Canada, versus Matt Tkachuk, the loudmouthed poster child of Team USA. The plains of Alberta, where hockey is religion, versus the sunny beaches of Florida, where the relative anonymity of local NHL stars is a selling point to free agents.   

That’s just off the ice. Between the whistles, the clubs’ different approaches to goaltending and the style of officiating will go a long way towards settling the Cup issue. Read on for more on these and other storylines to watch as we near the finale of the 2025 Stanley Cup Playoffs.

Forget the Gretzky/Crosby comparisons: The McDavid situation is far more dire

When the Edmonton Oilers punched their ticket back to the Stanley Cup Final, sportswriters across North America raced to tweet the most painfully obvious, slam-dunk parallel of the year. If you aren’t the social media type (lucky you), here it is: Connor McDavid is the third captain to earn a chance at revenge in a Stanley Cup rematch since 1980.

The others? Wayne Gretzky and Sidney Crosby, the two men he has been measured against his entire adult life. The narrative wrote itself, but otherworldly talent is where the similarities between McDavid and his predecessors end.

When Gretzky’s Oilers finally converted their free-scoring ways into championship success, he was only 24. He had just concluded his first season as captain, a season during which Edmonton racked up an NHL-record 446 goals, and youngsters Paul Coffey and Jari Kurri had fully arrived as superstars in the preceding months. It was simply their time, and a humbling experience at the hands of Al Arbour’s almighty, four-peat New York Islanders in ‘83 only made Edmonton’s ascension the next year that much more inevitable; the Oilers knew exactly what to expect from the Isles and handled them in five.

Similarly, when “Sid the Kid” won his first Cup in 2009, he was really a kid, just 21 years old. In 2008, he and Evgeni Malkin fell short to a Detroit Red Wings club that had by then been the class of the NHL for over a decade. Nicklas Lidstrom, Chris Osgood, and Detroit took Pittsburgh’s young roster to school with consecutive shutouts to open the series. The Pens still managed to push them to six and returned a year later ready to take the baton from their aging rivals. More Cups would inevitably follow for Gretzky and Crosby, five in total. 

McDavid, meanwhile, is 28. His linemates have a mean age of 36, and the roster around him is the NHL’s oldest. His goal-scoring is already on a downward trajectory (43.7/82 GP from 2016-2023, 33.3/82 GP since), and there’s no telling how a player so singularly explosive will adjust to any decline in speed. Then there’s the salary cap: McDavid’s next contract, if it’s worth even 80% of his market value, will take a sledgehammer to Edmonton’s championship window.

Those factors made last year’s defeat to the Florida Panthers more of a soul-crushing near-miss than a useful learning experience, and the stakes are even higher for the Oil in 2025. This isn’t the beginning of McDavid’s Stanley Cup story, it’s the end, his big shot to avoid the dubious honor of becoming the “best player to never win during his prime.” No pressure.

Skinner vs. Bob tests the merits of two very different approaches to goaltending

Stuart Skinner vs. Sergei Bobrovsky is a stylistic matchup between a big netminder adept at cutting angles and a post-to-post athlete with a flair for the dramatic. It’s also a matchup of the two prevailing organizational theories on goaltending. Option A: get a guy, an adequate starter that won’t sink your regular season and, hopefully, is tough enough to heat up in crunch time behind a great team. Like Skinner. Option B: pull out all the stops and get the guy, a Vezina winner, a superstar, and live with the concessions you had to make to fit him under the salary cap. Like Bobrovsky. Which approach has worked better in the past? That’s a tricky one.

Two of the past ten Cup-winning goalies, Matt Murray (2016) and Jordan Binnington (2019), rookies when they lifted the mug, are useless for the sake of this exercise; organizations don’t plan on piling that level of pressure on a fresh-faced kid ahead of time. That brings us back to 2013, and starting with the last five champs, the big-ticket goalies (2024 Bobrovsky, 2020-21 Andrei Vasilevskiy) are out to an early lead over the future trivia answers. The Colorado Avalanche bailed Darcy Kuemper out of some rough numbers in 2022, and Adin Hill was the Vegas Golden Knights‘ fourth-stringer at one point in 2023.

Capitals’ legend Braden Holtby, a Vezina winner with a salary to match by 2018, extends the superstars’ lead to 4-2. Murray may have been a phenom for the Pens in 2017, but his zero combined Vezina and All-Star ballots make him “a guy” and narrow the deficit to 4-3. Jonathan Quick opens the lead back up to 5-3 for the headliners, but Corey Crawford, who battled for ice time with Ray Emery throughout 2013 and briefly lost his net to Scott Darling in 2015, knots it up at 5-5 to the chagrin of Chicagoans who prefer to remember the good times.

That means this series will go a long way toward determining the “right” way to pick goalies. The GMs who haven’t decided on a long-term starter yet should be pulling for Skinner; it’s a lot easier to find a gutsy gamer than a 400-game winner.

Is it too late for the NHL to crack down on cheap shots?

Last season, after being concussed by a gloved punch from now-teammate Sam Bennett, then Bruins’ captain Brad Marchand lamented that “part of the playoffs is trying to hurt every player on the other team, and the more guys you take out, the more advantage your team has.” No one took him seriously. The player with the most suspensions in NHL history was trying to be a martyr and justify his past transgressions (everyone does it!) all at once. “The Rat” sounded full of it then, but given how these 2025 playoffs have gone, maybe there was some truth to his ramblings.

Most of the shenanigans have, of course, revolved around the Panthers. Their excuse this season is that Brandon Hagel started it, but after Tkachuk took out Jake Guentzel, Florida and the Tampa Bay Lightning should have been square. Instead, Aaron Ekblad kept the bad blood going by elbowing Hagel in the face rather than dropping the gloves with him. Even if all the chicanery after Hagel ran Sasha Barkov was fair game, that doesn’t justify Bennett’s headshot to Anthony Stolarz in an entirely different series. Or his headshot to Matthew Knies in 2023. Or the one to Marchand last year. The Cats are dirty. You can say it. It’s liberating.

Like the Philadelphia Flyers of old, the Panthers are masters at forcing referees to “manage the game,” only calling their very worst transgressions. It would seem that much of the NHL has followed their lead this season. The Carolina Hurricanes’ only answer to Florida’s physicality was to try and play some dirty pool of their own; Andrei Svechnikov knew exactly what he was doing when he pulled a Bennett-esque flyby on Bobrovsky, as did Aho when he dropped low on Panthers’ star Sam Reinhart. The Oilers are also getting in on the act. Darnell Nurse probably didn’t mean to break Roope Hintz’s foot with the sort of slash that happens all the time at the goalmouth, but Evan Bouchard’s love tap to said foot two games later was far less ambiguous.

Is it too late for the stripes to get a handle on the melee? Probably. If neither Bennett nor Svechnikov gets games for braining a goalie, if Bouchard never hears from the Department of Player Safety about “testing out” a star player’s busted foot, if bad hits replace fighting as teams’ method of policing the game, then yes, it’s gotten out of hand. We can only hope that no more injuries result from the lax officiating; this series becomes a lot less interesting if McDavid or Bobrovsky misses time from a cheap shot. 

Leon Drasaitl seeks personal redemption in his second crack at the Cup

Years from now, box score watchers will see Draisaitl’s paltry returns from the 2024 Stanley Cup Final (three assists in seven GP) and figure he choked. For the fifth most prolific per-game scorer in postseason history (min. 50 points), those totals aren’t good enough. They don’t tell the whole story though; like Matthew Tkachuk in 2023, Draisaitl, who had been on a Herculean run (28 P in 18 GP), was ravaged by injuries by the time the final rolled around. The German wasn’t right, and wouldn’t have suited up at all if the stakes weren’t so high. Draisaitl’s dud in last year’s Final might not have been his fault, but he nonetheless saved the worst single-series scoring rate of his entire career for the worst possible time.

If he had put up anything resembling “usual” output, say, three goals and eight points, would the Oilers have stolen the seven-game stand? Soon, we won’t have to wonder. Draisaitl is 100% ahead of the rematch with Florida, and no one will want to make things right more than the reigning Rocket Richard winner save for perhaps linemate Evander Kane, who was similarly hampered by injury last year. We know how dangerous ‘Neon Leon’ is on the man advantage, but if he and Kane (11 points in 15 GP) start clicking at even strength, the Oilers will have their answer to Florida’s Bennett line. 

Despite trailing only McDavid for the postseason points lead, Draisaitl is still due for an outburst; his 16.7 shooting percentage is down five ticks from his regular season rate and 1.5% from his career playoff mark. A motivated, healthy Draisaitl is a scary thought for the Cats, who only just survived the Oilers last season even as he struggled.  He gets to make things right starting tomorrow night, and the Panthers had better have a plan to slow him down other than praying for another injury.

Last year’s triumph doesn’t take too much pressure off the Panthers

Florida’s coronation in 2024 means that all the pressure has shifted to McDavid and the Oilers ahead of Round 2 between the powerhouse teams. The Panthers, already champions save for a handful of new additions, don’t have to worry about coming up short anymore. The hard part is done and, if the first three rounds were any indication, they’re totally at ease thanks to their prior success.

Appearances can be deceiving though, and the monumental heat on Edmonton doesn’t exempt the Panthers from feeling a bit of pressure of their own.

Like the Oilers, they’re an older team, and though they’re comparatively flush with cap space, power forward Sam Bennett, whose 10 goals lead all skaters, and franchise pillar Aaron Ekblad are out of contract. Even if GM Bill Zito inks both men to one of his signature team-friendly deals, they’re still injury-prone players who have racked up some hard miles in three consecutive Cup runs. Barkov’s style of play isn’t as high-impact as Bennett’s or prone to punishment as Ekblad’s, but he hasn’t played an 82-game season since he was 23, and all those extra playoff games haven’t helped.

Then there’s Bob, a 36-year-old who seems to lose about 20 pounds of water weight every game. The Panthers are running the old warhorse into the ground, and his former heir apparent Spencer Knight is no longer around as a safety blanket.

The Panthers’ downfall might not come next season, but the cliff isn’t too far over the horizon. They know from their old rivals in Tampa and Vegas how quickly a championship core can go stale. They also know, despite how easy they make it look, how tough it is getting to the Cup Final. No team has done that four times in a row since the aforementioned Islanders dynasty, a roster full of Hall-of-Famers in a much smaller league.

If Florida wins now, they vault themselves into rarefied air as one of the best teams of the 21st Century, maybe ever. Go one-for-three, and they could lose their chance at earning a seat at that table for good. It never gets easier.

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