NHL Stanley Cup Final predictions: A coach, a scout and an executive pick the winner (2024)

For every round of the NHL playoffs, we have asked an NHL executive, coach and scout to make a prediction and then explain the rationale behind their choices. We granted them anonymity in exchange for candor — and six weeks ago, at the start of the process, our scout picked the Edmonton Oilers to go to the final against the Florida Panthers.

Which is how it ultimately turned out.

The Stanley Cup Final will feature the NHL’s fifth (Florida) and ninth (Edmonton) ranked teams, by points percentage. The regular-season gap was six points (Florida, 110; Edmonton 104). Back on Nov. 22, or U.S. Thanksgiving, the Oilers were 30th out of 32 teams, with a .306 winning percentage. But after making the coaching change, from Jay Woodcroft to Kris Knoblauch, they slowly turned their season around. By Christmas Day, they were back at .500 (15-15-1). From Dec. 21 to Jan. 27, they won 16 games in a row.

Since the start of the calendar year, the Oilers (31-12-5, 67 points) and Panthers (30-12-4, 64 points) finished second and third (tied) for regular season wins. Since Jan. 1, McDavid led the NHL in scoring, with an eye-popping 84 points in 44 games, and averaging nearly two points per game (1.91). Meanwhile, the Panthers’ Sam Reinhart finished with 34 regular-season goals since Jan. 1 — the second most among all players behind Toronto’s Auston Matthews.

Reinhart (57) and Zach Hyman (54) were two of the four NHLers to hit the 50-goal mark this season, marking the 10th Stanley Cup Final to feature a 50-goal scorer on each team.

In an era of parity, teams usually need to elevate some element of their game to rise above the rest in the playoffs — and in Edmonton’s case, it was their ability to kill penalties. In the regular season, they were just middle of the pack (15th overall, at 79.5 percent). In the playoffs, they are an eye-popping 93.9 percent, tops in the league — and the Dallas Stars went zero-for-the-Western Conference final with the man advantage, one of the big reasons they are on the sidelines today.

Meanwhile, Florida’s playoff penalty-killing more consistently reflected what was already a regular-season strength. They were sixth in the league, at 82.5 percent, but slightly better in the postseason (88.2). Edmonton’s power play, so good in the first two rounds, stumbled a little against Dallas, but ultimately contributed to the critical wins in Games 5 and 6.

How the special teams’ battle unfolds will be one of half a dozen intriguing storylines in the final. Florida has never won the Stanley Cup in franchise history, and Edmonton hasn’t won since 1990. As you’ve probably heard endlessly now, the Oilers are trying to become the first Canadian-based NHL team to win the Stanley Cup since the Montreal Canadiens did it in 1993.

Can they do it?

Let’s begin with our scout, who has been on the Florida bandwagon since the start of the playoffs.

“I was a little leery at first because it’s hard to lose in the final one year and then go back the next, but the way Florida’s played, they just look so playoff prepared,” he said. “They’re built for the playoffs and sometimes, if you play that way all year, it can wear you down because it’s a hard way to play. But they’ve just gotten better in the playoffs.

“They look determined to take the final step and they look a lot healthier this year.”

Health is a critical consideration on the Florida side of the equation, because a year ago, the Panthers lost their driving force, Matthew Tkachuk in the Vegas series with a broken sternum, and had two defensem*n, Aaron Ekblad and Brandon Montour, limping to the finish line because of injuries that limited their effectiveness.

Both required major offseason surgery and didn’t return to the lineup until December. Knowing they needed NHL-level replacement players, the Panthers signed three free-agent defensem*n on July 1 a year ago, Niko Mikkola, Oliver-Ekman Larsson and Dmitri Kulikov, all of whom played higher in the lineup while Ekblad and Montour convalesced and then became the perfect four-five-six defensem*n on the current team.

Every member of the panel praised the work of Panthers GM Bill Zito for finding the correct reinforcements and being able to shoehorn them onto the Panthers’ roster, amid the salary-cap challenges that every contending team deals with.

“Florida is a better team this year than last year,” said our coach. “When we played them early in the year, you could see how valuable the pieces they added in the offseason were. Just their size. They were bigger. And that had to be a byproduct of losing to Vegas in the final.”

On the Oilers side, Evan Bouchard has been dynamic. With 27 points in 18 games played, he became the sixth defenseman in league history to record 20 assists in a postseason. And while our executive thought the Panthers don’t have anyone as dynamic as Bouchard on the blue line, they are collectively a deeper, more well-rounded group on defense.

“Bouchard has shown the hockey world that he just might crack the small group of defensem*n in the NHL who are considered for the Norris Trophy every year,” he said. “He’s been stellar throughout the playoffs, especially on the power play. Those 27 points puts him just two behind Cale Makar’s 29 points in 2022 as the highest-scoring defenseman in one playoff year in the past 25 years. That’s something he could easily pass in the Finals.

“But,” he cautioned, “in the Finals, you often see a lot of low-scoring games and overall, Florida’s overall defensive group might be a little ahead of the Oilers.”

Arguably, no storyline will be more heavily scrutinized than the goaltending matchup that features Edmonton’s Stuart Skinner against Sergei Bobrovsky for Florida. Curiously, in the semi-finals, the victorious teams both had the second-best goaltending on paper and advanced anyway. Goaltending can be that way — weirdly unpredictable.

The gap was widest in the West, where Dallas’s Jake Oettinger was everybody’s clear choice against Skinner. In fact, Oilers coach Kris Knoblauch had to confirm before Game 4 vs. Dallas that he was sticking with Skinner, after a rocky outing, because a round earlier, he had switched to Calvin Pickard. In the East, the Rangers’ Igor Shesterkin was flat-out brilliant, arguably the best player on either team in the series. In the end, it didn’t matter.

Discussing how the goaltending matchups unfolded in the conference final, our coach candidly noted: “I did not see that coming. Florida-Rangers, for sure, I thought would go seven — and it probably should have, the way Shesterkin played. When those players get a chance to reflect, they’re going to realize how they pissed away goaltending of the caliber that you don’t get every year.

“On the Edmonton side, you have to give Skinner some props. This guy has been slapped around, taken out of games in the Vancouver series, put back into games, which then he won. Everybody was looking for him to spit the bit — and he hasn’t. Before the Dallas series, when you compared Oettinger to Skinner, it was a no-brainer. But … Skinner beat them — and he’s going on.”

“Florida still has the advantage, with Bobrovsky over Skinner,” added our executive, “but Skinner’s proving the experts wrong. I don’t believe goaltending is going to be the Achilles’ heel for the Oilers.”

Up front, our scout noted how much he’s looking forward to seeing the matchup down the middle, where the Oilers’ dynamic duo of McDavid and Draisaitl will go up against Aleksander Barkov, the NHL’s top defensive forward, plus the Panthers’ impactful No. 2, Sam Bennett.

McDavid had joined elite scoring company in these playoffs, already over the 30-point threshold prior to the start of the Stanley Cup Final for the second time in his career (also 2022). He’s only the second player in NHL history to do so, after Wayne Gretzky did it four times.

“New York’s centers just weren’t able to match up against Florida’s size and physicality,” said our scout. “Now Draisaitl can, so that’s going to be interesting. But Barkov is such a factor, and then you have Bennett coming in behind him. They’re relentless — and that’s the uniqueness of the playoffs. You’re not going against a small team one night and then a fast team the next night. You’re playing against the same team over and over in a two-week period — and you can wear them down. It’s night after night. It’s a grind. You can get them thinking, ‘man, we just can’t get anywhere against these guys.’ It can wear on your will. And that’s what Florida does.”

In 2019, the St. Louis Blues won the Stanley Cup after a stutter-stepping start to the season, a feat the Oilers are now trying to duplicate. That would be a Cinderella finish to a season that looked grim early on. In the end, however, all three of our panelists believe the clock is about to strike midnight on the Oilers’ playoff run.

While they anticipate an exciting, hard-fought series, ultimately all three chose Florida to win.

“This is why I hate making picks,” said our scout. “To be honest, as a Canadian, my heart says Edmonton, but my head says Florida. Edmonton is going through this for the first time and in that way, they’re almost like Florida was last year. But let’s see.”

Our coach was succinct: “I’m picking Florida in seven — just because they’re deeper and I think they defend better than Edmonton as a group.”

The final word goes to our executive, who also believes that Florida’s experience last year will go a long way in helping them this time around.

“If you look at the history of the playoffs over the past 50 years, it’s rare to find a team that lost the Stanley Cup final in back-to-back years,” he said. “It happened to the Boston Bruins in 1977 and 1978 and then to the St. Louis Blues, coming out of expansion, in 1969 and 1970.

“In other words, experience matters.

“I’m picking Florida in six games, which means they’d win the Stanley Cup in Edmonton — a fitting way for Matthew Tkachuk to put the last dagger in the province of Alberta.”

Ouch.

The picks

Scout: Panthers in 7.
Coach: Panthers in 7.
Executive: Panthers in 6
Consensus: Panthers win the Stanley Cup.

(Illustration: Dan Goldfarb / The Athletic. Photo: John McCreary / NHLI via Getty Images)

Eric Duhatschek is a senior hockey writer for The Athletic. He spent 17 years as a columnist for The Globe and Mail and 20 years covering the Calgary Flames and the NHL for the Calgary Herald. In 2001, he won the Elmer Ferguson Award, given by the Hockey Hall of Fame for distinguished hockey journalism, and previously served on the Hockey Hall of Fame selection committee. Follow Eric on Twitter @eduhatschek