Florida Panthers fans Jessyca and Joseph Grella of Hollywood, Fla., arrive at the arena before Game 5 of the NHL hockey Stanley Cup Finals against the Edmonton Oilers on June 18, 2024, in Sunrise, Fla.Wilfredo Lee/The Associated Press
It’s officially summer, and the best two teams in hockey during the winter months of the 2023-24 NHL season are still playing.
Whichever team wins Game 6 – and Game 7, if necessary – of the Stanley Cup Final between the Edmonton Oilers and Florida Panthers that resumes in Alberta on Friday night will not only be a team for all time as hockey’s champion. It will be a rare team for all seasons, too.
Let’s explain: Summer began in the Northern Hemisphere on Thursday. That makes this the fourth time in the past five years that the NHL season has stretched into the summer months and the sixth time that it’s happened in league history.
But the Panthers or Oilers – or both – will join a very short list of teams to win games in fall, winter, spring and summer in the same NHL season.
“We’re incredibly lucky, for sure,” Panthers forward Ryan Lomberg said. “We were talking about the other day, that teams that haven’t made the playoffs have been at home for a couple months now.”
The first two instances of Cup final games getting played in summer – 1995 and 2013 – were because those seasons started late due to labour strife and no games were played in the fall. The 2019-20 season started in the fall 2019 and ended in the fall 2020, but saw no games played in spring 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic. The 2020-21 season stretched into summer but didn’t start until mid-January so, again, no fall games were played.
There have been two teams in NHL history – the 2021-22 Colorado Avalanche and Tampa Bay Lightning – to win games in fall, winter, spring and summer in the same season. That year’s schedule saw a slew of postponements because of the pandemic and the Stanley Cup Final stretched into the summer. Colorado went 2-1, Tampa Bay 1-2 following the June solstice that year.
The winner of Friday’s Game 6 of this year’s Cup final in Edmonton will become the third team in NHL history to win a game in fall, winter, spring and summer in the same hockey season. (And if it’s the Oilers, that means the Panthers will have another chance to join that list in Sunrise, Fla., on Monday night in Game 7.)
The only time the Stanley Cup has been handed out later in the calendar year has been seasons affected by a strike, lockout or the pandemic. The last time the Oilers won it, in 1990, it was May 24.