Sam Reinhart made sure the Florida Panthers didn’t leave the door cracked this time around.
Reinhart scored four goals on Tuesday, leading the Panthers to their second straight Stanley Cup Final with a 5-1 victory against the visiting Edmonton Oilers in Game 6 at Sunrise, Fla.
“It’s not easy coming back, and you know how hard it is to do,” Reinhart said of repeating. “Sometimes that benefits you, and sometimes it doesn’t. We just stuck with it. A lot has to go your way to be standing here at the end, and we were up for the task again.”
Reinhart scored on all four shots he took to become the first player with four goals in a Stanley Cup Final since the Montreal Canadiens’ Maurice Richard accomplished the feat in 1957. He finished with seven goals in the last four games of the series, tallying in each contest.
Florida won the first three games of the 2024 Stanley Cup Final against the Oilers, but then had to sweat through three losses before a 2-1 win in Game 7 allowed them to celebrate.
Matthew Tkachuk, who revealed after the game he had been playing with a torn adductor muscle and a hernia, also scored for the Panthers, who are the third team to repeat as Stanley Cup champions in the past 10 years.
“The culture down here is very, very unique,” said Tkachuk, who was traded to the Panthers from the Calgary Flames three years ago. “Hopefully, we can do it again.”
Sergei Bobrovsky came within 4:42 of his fourth shutout of the 2025 playoffs before Vasily Podkolzin scored for the Oilers. Bobrovsky finished with 28 saves.
Stuart Skinner made 20 saves for the Oilers. A team from Canada has not won the Cup since Montreal triumphed in 1993.
“There’s no silver lining to this,” Edmonton coach Kris Knoblauch said. “It’s still heart-wrenching. It’s very difficult to handle right now. … It hurts right now, and I don’t think it’s going to let up for a while.”
The Panthers scored the first goal for the fifth straight game.
Edmonton was outshooting Florida 5-0 when Reinhart stole the puck from defenseman Evan Bouchard at the Oilers’ blue line. Reinhart then juked past Mattias Ekholm at the top of the right circle before scoring over Skinner’s glove for a 1-0 lead at 4:36.
“Unfortunately, we just couldn’t score those early goals,” Knoblauch said.
The Panthers added to their lead in the final minute of the opening period. Eetu Luostarinen pulled up above the right circle in the Edmonton zone off a rush and waited for Tkachuk, who had just jumped onto the ice.
After receiving Luostarinen’s pass, Tkachuk brought the puck to the high slot before hitting the top right corner of the net with a wrist shot, giving Florida a 2-0 lead with 47 seconds left before intermission.
Florida outscored the Oilers 13-4 in the opening period during the series.
The Panthers made it 3-0 at 17:31 of the second.
Carter Verhaeghe took a wrist shot from along the boards and above the right circle that hit Skinner in the chest. The rebound came out diagonally to Aleksander Barkov cutting through the left circle, and his feed to Reinhart moving to the opposite post went off his left skate blade and into the Edmonton net.
The Oilers pulled Skinner with about seven minutes left and Reinhart scored into the empty net for a 4-0 lead with 6:34 remaining, giving him the first playoff hat trick in Panthers history.
He wasn’t finished, as Edmonton pulled Skinner again and Reinhart scored into the empty net to make it 5-0 with 5:05 left. Reinhart joined Babe Dye of the 1922 Toronto St. Patricks as the only players to record four goals in a Stanley Cup-clinching victory.
“Everybody wrote us off from the start of the playoffs,” Florida forward Brad Marchand said. “They had everybody beating us in every round, and we just had that fire. We knew we had something special.”
Even though the Oilers faced elimination for four straight games in last season’s Stanley Cup Final, Knoblauch felt as if 2023-24 was a more successful season.
“We went to Game 7, and Game 7 was so close,” Knoblauch said.
–Field Level Media
