PREVIEW: Oilers vs. Panthers (Game 1)
EDMONTON, AB – It was always going to be us and them.
Get ready for the rematch. And once again, the stakes involve everything.
Meeting in the Stanley Cup Final for the second straight year, the Edmonton Oilers and Florida Panthers have proven to be battle-tested once again through another challenging regular season and playoff campaign as the last two – and the best two – teams remaining in the NHL to contest hockey’s silver chalice.
Edmonton and Florida will face off in the 11th-ever Stanley Cup Final rematch in League history and the first since Detroit and Pittsburgh met in back-to-back years in 2008-09. This will be the second for the Oilers in their franchise history, having been swept by the Islanders in 1983 before winning in five games in 1984 to capture their first of five Stanley Cups over the next eight years.
This year, the Oilers feel they’ve taken steps to ensure they follow the script written by the 2009 Penguins and the 1984 Oilers, who both learned from their first experience to lift the Stanley Cup on the second try.
“I would say it’s just dealing with the emotion of it, just because you feel closer,” Connor McDavid said. “There’s a big circus. It can feel larger than it actually is. At the end of the day, it’s another series, and we’re playing another great team. You’ve to beat them before anything else happens, so they’ve our complete focus. All of our energy is going into beating the Florida Panthers. There should be nothing else on anyone’s mind.
“I think there’s familiarity there. We know what to expect from their game. They know what to expect from ours. They’re an aggressive, in-your-face, quick team. We played a team like that in LA, I would say there’s a little bit of that familiarity there.”
This post was originally published on this site be sure to check out more of their content.
