Florida Panthers' Aaron Ekblad chases Edmonton Oilers' Zach Hyman on the breakaway during second period Game 6 action in the NHL Stanley Cup finals in Edmonton, on June 21.JASON FRANSON/The Canadian Press
Twenty years ago in The New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell explained the difference between choking and panicking.
He used the example of Jana Novotná and the 1993 Wimbledon final. Novotná was five points from victory when she became suddenly unable to play tennis. She spent 20-odd minutes spraying shots around Centre Court like she was trying to put out a fire in the stands.
That match is most famous for the image of Novotná at the end, crying on the shoulder of the Duchess of Kent. It was an epic choke. Maybe the finest example of the form.
Choking happens when your instincts turn off under pressure, and you are left thinking your way through every move.
Panic is the opposite. Under the same stress, a person loses the ability to think. What should be easy becomes hard, and solutions become erratic.
By those definitions, the Florida Panthers are in the midst of choking, but you can feel the panic setting in.
“I’m not concerned about the past at all,” Florida coach Paul Maurice said ahead of Monday’s Game 7.
In photos: Edmonton Oilers beat Florida Panthers in game six of the Stanley Cup finals
Maurice is thinking about this the wrong way around. He may not be concerned with the past, but it is concerned with him. He’s less than 24 hours from becoming the captain of the Titanic.
An epic choke has a few requirements. The advantage before the choke begins should be widely perceived as insurmountable. The stage should be enormous. Most importantly, a truly magisterial choke overrides all the choker’s other accomplishments, and comes to define him.
Bill Buckner hit .289 over his career. He got MVP votes and played until he was 40. His entire legacy is pinned to a ball he could’ve scooped 10,000 times out of 10,000, but not when it mattered in the World Series.
Greg Norman won two majors. At some not-too-distant future point, all he will be remembered for is blowing a six-shot lead on a Sunday at the Masters.
What did the Houston Oilers do? Choke away the biggest second-half lead in NFL playoff history.
Who is Jean Van de Velde? Some French guy who turned the British Open from golf into triathlon on the 18th hole.
Even David Beckham, who won a million trophies, is best known at home as the guy who cost England a shot at a World Cup title. Was kicking an opponent while the referee was standing there staring at him a choke or a panic? It doesn’t matter to the English.
One gets the impression that all the self-promotion Beckham has done since – the documentaries, the advertisements, the paid appearances – is in an effort to make people forget about one moment a quarter-century ago.
Most grand chokes happen under heavy scrutiny. There’s a reason guys blow it at a major – they start thinking about how many people are watching, and how it’s weird that the ball could go any way when you hit it, but you need it to go only one exact way.
Van de Velde agreed to go back years later and walk through his disastrous final hole at Carnoustie. He needed to shoot a 6 on the par-4 to win the tournament. He shot 7 and lost in a playoff. You can probably still picture Van de Velde standing in a creek with his pants rolled up nearly to his crotch.
Speaking two decades later, Van de Velde was still stuck in stunned denial.
“If there was one shot to play again, that would be [the creek bound] one,” he said.
One??
Watching the Panthers talk now, you are getting a bad, Jean-Van-de-Velde feeling off them. It’s not what they’re saying. The correct clichés to roll out in this situation are so embedded in the culture that you or I could do their media right now.
It’s the way they’re saying them. It’s something behind the eyes. A sense of what’s coming.
This particular choke would be unlike nearly all others in that while the stage is large, it has not happened under intense examination until the very end.
The NHL does such a poor job of promoting its stars that it couldn’t even sell Connor McDavid. Nobody outside Canada was interested in this series before it started.
That was an advantage to the Panthers. If you had to describe their approach, it might be “loose.” And why not? They work in a swamp girded by a highway that’s a 40-minute drive from what most people would consider civilization. Talk about escaping the pressure of pro sports.
One week ago, the Panthers played under cover of relative anonymity. Now, for just an instant, they will become an object of fascination for every vaguely sporty citizen of planet Earth. From Luxembourg to Lahore, people are going to want to know if those guys who beat each other up on skates really found a way to cough up a 3-0 lead.
Has there ever been a game of hockey more likely to attract global attention than Monday’s? An Olympic final, maybe. We haven’t had one of those that anyone cares about in a decade. Since then, social media has expanded some. All sports are global now. Every blooper is one TikTok away from becoming a planetary moment.
Billions won’t be watching on Monday night, but billions may want to know how it turns out.
Novotná had seconds to think about how she could not lose, up 4-1 and 40-30 in the final set, and then it all went sideways.
The Panthers will have had nearly three days to run through all the ways this can go bad and what happens if it does. Each one of them must have at some point imagined themselves as the guy who makes the crucial mistake. A special hell awaits whoever that is.
Even from the neutral perspective, it’s starting to feel fated. If it goes that way, it won’t just be the biggest choke in hockey history. It will be the biggest global moment hockey’s had since the Miracle on Ice.