With the Florida Panthers one win away from hoisting the Stanley Cup, the lesson seems simple for the New York Rangers.
Bulk up. Size matters. Physicality and grit and brute force in the corners and in front of the net is what works in the playoffs, a fact reinforced by the roster construction of the last six – and most likely seven – NHL champions.
It all sounds so easy. As with most situations that appear that way, however, it’s not nearly so elementary.
It’s true that the teams that have hoisted the Cup since 2018 have been big and strong, more than willing to get down in the mud and battle for every inch of space while taking and giving out poundings. None of those clubs, however, were able to do that just because they acquired guys who played that way – at least, not only because of that.
What the Rangers will require to get past the Panthers – who hammered them out of the postseason this year in the latest such teaching moment, ones that seem to go generally unheeded at Madison Square Garden – and the Tampa Bay Lightnings of the NHL world, is a switch in the mindset of the core players who aren’t going anywhere. Accomplishing that varies from team to team, and how and if the Blueshirts get there will be an individual experience – not the following of a set of instructions on How to Win the Stanley Cup.
For Florida, a once heavily-skilled outfit that piled up 122 points in the 2021-22 season, the evolution began that summer, after the club’s straight straight playoff loss to a Lightning team that went through its own metamorphosis a couple of years earlier and reached the top of the championship mountain (more on that later). The catalyst for it was a blockbuster trade that accomplished so much more than just adding a great player: the July 22, 2022 acquisition of power forward Matthew Tkachuk from the Calgary Flames.
Matthew Tkachuk, Shanahan Transformed Panthers, Red Wings
The price to obtain Tkachuk looked very steep at the time. The Panthers sent left wing Jonathan Huberdeau, who was coming off a 115-point season, along with top-four defenseman MacKenzie Weegar, forward prospect Cole Schwindt and a 2025 first-round pick to Calgary. The Flames were lauded at the time for getting a big return on a player who had informed them that he wouldn’t sign with the team long-term and was a year away from unrestricted free agency.
Tkachuk, though, has made the deal look like a huge bargain for the Panthers, who understood that players like him are rare, and become available even more rarely. The 6-foot-2, 206-pound winger has recorded 197 points in 159 games over two seasons in Sunrise, but that represents only half of his contribution.
The 26-year-old is among the nastiest and most physical players in the league, a throwback who profoundly affects the game with his agitation of opponents. Critically, that has rubbed off on his Panthers teammates. Before Tkachuk, Florida didn’t carry the cliched but accurate label of “hard to play against,” the goal of every contender. This postseason has proven that there might not be an NHL team that’s less appealing to take on in a playoff series than the Panthers.
With Tkachuk and fellow superstar Sasha Barkov (6-3, 215) battling it out down low, and other edgy players like Sam Bennett and Ryan Lomberg following Tkachuk’s lead, the Panthers have looked all but impossible to stop in the offensive zone and extremely difficult to generate sustained pressure against in their own end. With a 3-0 lead over the Edmonton Oilers in the Stanley Cup Final, Florida can all but taste the champagne.
Tkachuk’s addition might have paved a new path for the franchise, but his teammates’ buy-in to walking it is the wisdom the Rangers must heed as they look for a way to take the next step.
“We’ve got two years of doing it,” said well-traveled coach Paul Maurice, whose hiring exactly one month before Tkachuk’s arrival has also been instrumental in converting these Panthers. “We play tight games. We’ve always played tight, hard games. We don’t necessarily score easily. That’s not a function of skill or talent.” (From ‘Panthers Proving They Are Built For The Moment, Using a Formula 2 Years In The Making’, The Athletic, 6/11/24)
A team acquiring a player who helps turn it from a freewheeling one into a hardened, fully committed championship group isn’t new. Before the 2024 Panthers (again, almost champions), there were the 1997 and ’98 Detroit Red Wings, they of the Russian Five and Steve Yzerman and Nicklas Lidstrom who boasted a ridiculously talented roster, but couldn’t or wouldn’t do what it took to win the Cup.
From 1992-96, the Wings topped the 100-point mark three times, including a then-record 62 wins to go with 131 points in 1995-96. Yet none of those four seasons ended with them lifting the chalice, raising the same questions about the current group of Rangers – were they built to win a championship? Were they highly-skilled regular-season warriors, unable to match up with tougher teams who could bang them around and out of a postseason series?
After falling to the Colorado Avalanche in the Western Conference Final in 1996, the Red Wings acquired Brendan Shanahan from the Hartford Whalers early in the 1996-97 season. Arguably the greatest power forward in NHL history, the 6-foot-3, 220-pound Shanahan recorded 87 points in 79 games, would fight anyone and inspired his Detroit teammates through force of will to adopt a mentally and physically tougher mindset. Reaching the Stanley Cup Final for the second time in three years, the Wings faced one of the scariest teams in recent history in the Philadelphia Flyers, led by the giant Legion of Doom line of Eric Lindros, John LeClair and Mikael Renberg, and possessing a towering roster that struck fear into the rest of the league.
Yet the Wings were hardly intimidated, and as a group that had gotten bigger and stronger with Shanahan and others, rolled to a sweep. They went on to repeat in 1998, and then won the Cup again in 2002. Detroit, like Florida appears to have done 27-plus years later, didn’t morph into a championship outfit until a certain player with a certain style arrived to lead the way. And like these Panthers, the front office of those Red Wings understood that the opportunity to acquire a player like Shanahan represented an uncommon opportunity, happily sending back center Keith Primeau, defenseman Paul Coffey and a first-round pick in what also looked like a strong return for the Whalers at the time.
Lightning Might Provide a Better Template for These Rangers
While wild rumors fueled by social media have insisted the Rangers will try to follow this model by prying Matthew’s brother Brady Tkachuk away from the Ottawa Senators this summer, the chances of that happening are likely nothing more than speculation. Perhaps the better source of inspiration for the Rangers should be the Lightning, who also built up into a perennial contender but failed over and over to find the formula to make it through the playoff gauntlet to the promised land.
From 2013-19, Tampa topped the 100-point mark four times and reached the Cup Final in 2015, yet was unable to finish. For those Lightning, the trigger for change was an embarrassing low point that proved to be a critical growth experience – a shocking first-round sweep by the Columbus Blue Jackets in 2019, a season in which the Lightning matched the 1995-96 Red Wings’ record with 62 victories.
Related: Rangers Require a Reworked Roster to Break Stanley Cup Drought
That loss was a revelation that altered the direction of the franchise. The upset, one of the biggest in NHL history, was so emphatic and left so little doubt that what the Lightning were doing wasn’t working, that the players realized they had no choice but to evolve. Seemingly overnight, Tampa Bay became a straight-line, hard-checking team that simplified its game to succeed in the playoffs, the high-octane style that worked so well in the regular season but failed in the postseason relegated to the past.
To be sure, Tampa didn’t go into the next season with the same personnel. The painful message was also received loud and clear in the front office, which added 2019 Cup champion Pat Maroon from the St. Louis Blues and Luke Schenn in the offseason. The Lightning then traded for current Ranger Barclay Goodrow and Blake Coleman at the 2020 deadline, supplementing with even more snarl, grit and veteran leadership for the postseason gauntlet.
While those newcomers all played key roles for Tampa, none of them were stars like Tkachuk and Shanahan. In this case, the acquiescence to a more stripped-down and simpler playoff style came from holdover stars like Nikita Kucherov, Steven Stamkos, Brayden Point and Victor Hedman, who led the Lightning to the Cup in 2019-20 and again in 2020-21. Those championships were born out of a moment that made it clear that Tampa wouldn’t become a championship team without committing to a certain way of playing which ran counter to the players’ natural instincts – a style that had yielded great regular-season success.
Can the Rangers do the same thing? Is their East Final defeat at the hands of Florida a sufficient-enough blow to make them realize that their current group just won’t succeed in the postseason tournament without everyone doing it differently? That absent a Brady Tkachuk blockbuster, general manager Chris Drury’s most realistic course of action will probably be to (finally) bolster the bottom six and the defense with more size, toughness and leadership, and hope it results in a “born-again” roster that hits and checks and wears down opponents with determination and discipline, just as the Panthers do and the Lightning did?
The 2023-24 Rangers exhibited determination in their pursuit of the Stanley Cup. They were disciplined at least most of the season, embracing new coach Peter Laviolette’s structure after asking for and getting someone behind the bench who would instill a culture of accountability and attention to detail. That led to 114 points, the Presidents Trophy and a second Eastern Conference Final appearance in three years.
Yet in falling short again, it should be more than apparent that there’s so much more this team has to do to be the 2023-24 Panthers or the 2020-21 Lightning. What happens in the front office this summer will be critical, but it won’t be more important than what stars Mika Zibanejad, Artemi Panarin, Chris Kreider and the rest of the core are willing to do to take the final steps to a championship. Assuming Drury, who recently said that “nothing’s off the table,” can’t find a Shanahan-Matthew Tkachuk kind of trade and most of the key pieces remains in place, will those players be able to embrace substantial change in the way they play, well into their highly successful careers?
The path forward is laid out in recent and not-so-recent NHL history. Whether these Rangers, both the players and front office, have the fortitude, boldness and wherewithal to follow it is another matter.
