EDMONTON — The trips don’t lie.
Look at the last three National Hockey League final fours: 12 spots in the Conference Final series across 2023, ’24 and ’25.
The Dallas Stars? They’ve been there every season — three straight Conference Finals.
The Florida Panthers? Same.
The Carolina Hurricanes and Edmonton Oilers have been in two each, with the Oilers dropping the 2022 Western Conference Final to Colorado. That’s three of the last four for Edmonton.
But as we enter the penultimate playoff round here in the spring of 2025, four teams have usurped 10 of the last 12 Conference Final berths, and those four remain again this season.
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Carolina-Florida and Dallas-Edmonton.
Not one of them won their division this season, but all of them are still standing — with the Stanley Cup Final scheduled to start out West, no matter who prevails in Round 3.
Carolina vs. Florida. Dallas vs. Edmonton.
Why?
How come the Oilers can figure out how to win three road games in Vegas in Round 2, but the Winnipeg Jets — the best team in the regular season — can not win one road game over the course of two playoff rounds?
Why can the Stars’ stars find a way to produce goals throughout the playoffs every year, yet the Toronto Maple Leafs’ Core Fore just can’t get the hang of playoff hockey?
Why was Washington ready for the regular season, but couldn’t weather the Hurricanes when the games truly mattered in Round 2?
How do the L.A. Kings have the best home record all season long, then lose a soul-crushing Game 5 to the Oilers from which they’d never recover?
It’s the great hockey mystery, isn’t it?
“You look at every team in the league that’s won the Stanley Cup — they’ve been on the cusp getting there for many years,” said Oilers defenceman John Klingberg, the best player on a Dallas Stars team that lost the 2020 Cup to Tampa in the Edmonton bubble.
“Dallas has been there. Edmonton has been there. Florida was there before they won. And Carolina has been there too. So that stuff doesn’t lie,” Klingberg said. “It shows how hard it is to win in this league. All four teams that are still left, they’re all doing the right things, then it just comes down to what happens during one game at a time, and first to four.”
Say what you want about the Oilers in the McDavid era. They haven’t won a Stanley Cup, yes, but on Wednesday in Dallas, they’ll open their 12th playoff series in the past four years.
Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl will play career playoff game No. 86 — at 28 and 29 years old, respectively. Fourteen Oilers played in a seven-game Stanley Cup Final 11 months ago, while Mattias Ekholm — who very much looks like he’ll be ready to rejoin this blue line during Round 3 — is one series away from his third Stanley Cup Final.
“It seems like you have to be knocking on that door for a while before you can … know what it takes,” Ekholm said after a brisk Monday practice, in which Ekholm — with a team doctor watching from the bench — took a regular turn throughout a 45-minute workout.
“It’s one thing to go to the second or third round,” he said. “When you’re in the Finals and have to actually bear down and go through it — and I haven’t done it (won a Cup), so I don’t even know if I know what it takes. But I like to think I do.
“Look at Florida, they had to go to a Final before they came through. Hopefully that holds true for us.”
Look at Florida.
What the Panthers teach us, after having finished fourth, first and third in the Atlantic over the last three seasons, is that the regular season is simply something to be endured.
It’s 82 games of building a game, maintaining health and energy, and making the playoffs while ensuring that your team is in its best place in mid-April — wherever the standings have you playing.
“There are a lot of good quality teams, and you see it during the regular season. It’s very difficult to say who the best teams are,” said Oilers head coach Kris Knoblauch. “I think of us going through the playoffs, the experience this team has had playing so many playoff games…
“When the playoffs do happen, there’s a lot of pressure and a lot of stress on everyone. The more that you’ve gone through it, the more it helps you,” he said. “The most important thing absolutely is skill. Having the best players is what’s important.
“But if you’re talking about experience, that just helps you more during the grind of the playoffs.”
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