McDavid says the Oilers’ veterans were built to handle the “aggressive” Panthers.

EDMONTON — The Edmonton Oilers know what to expect from the Florida Panthers. Lots of hits. Scrums after the whistle. A mixture of skill and will.

But the Oilers say they are not intimidated by the physical challenges presented by the Panthers. They’ll be ready to answer the buzzer when the Stanley Cup Finals begin on Saturday night.

“Florida plays a fast, upfront, aggressive game,” said Oilers captain Connor McDavid, who leads the playoff scoring race with 31 points. “I don’t think it changes anything.

“I would expect scrums and things like that. But we’re a veteran team, one of the older teams in the league. I don’t think those things bother the guys here.”

Florida made beating the beasts of the East look pretty easy. They defeated the New York Rangers in six games in the Eastern Conference Finals, but the Blueshirts got both wins in overtime. At no point were the Rangers decisively better than the Panthers.

Before that, they beat the big, bad Boston Bruins at their own game — playing a nasty, physical brand of hockey in a six-game winning streak. Aleksander Barkov, arguably the best two-way forward in the game, neutralized Bruins star David Pastrnak. And Sam Bennett took Brad Marchand out of the series with a foul shot.

The Tampa Bay Lightning and all of that team’s Stanley Cup experience was the Panthers’ first casualty. Florida eliminated its in-state rival in five games.

The Dallas Stars, who the Oilers beat in the Western Conference Finals, aren’t as big and bad as the Panthers. But the Oilers believe their second-round win over the Vancouver Canucks set them up well for what Florida will bring.

The Oilers fell 3-2 to Vancouver but came back to win in a grueling seven games. The Canucks were credited with 289 hits in the series, an average of more than 40 a night.

If the Oilers lift the Cup, Edmonton fans could actually write thank you notes to the Canucks for helping their team prepare for the Panthers.

“We played a real physical team in Vancouver as well,” McDavid said, “It’s the playoffs, it’s the finals. I would expect physicality no matter who we play.”

“We can be a physical team, too,” added Leon Draisaitl, second in the NHL playoff scoring race with 28 points. “Obviously, we like to play with the puck, but we’re definitely not intimidated by the physicality. We did well in the Vancouver series, we did well in the LA series (first round). Dallas was a little different. But we’re a pretty good team, we’ve got enough guys who know how to play that way.

“We’ll be ready to go.”

It’s not just the physical nature of the Vancouver series that prepares the Oilers for Florida. There was also the hype surrounding the all-Canadian series, where for two weeks the teams were front page news across the country.

Oilers first-pairing defenseman Mattias Ekholm said the pressure of the Canucks series prepared his team for the Cup.

“Playing Vancouver in the second series, with all that hype and all that pressure and all that stuff going on, whether it was here or in Vancouver, winning a series like that calms everything down,” he said.

“I think the series was like, ‘OK, well, this is about as intense as it gets.’

Of course, if there are scrums and late hits, the Oilers will welcome the power plays that come with them. Edmonton dominated special teams with a 37.3 percent success rate on the man advantage and a 93.9 percent penalty rate.

The Panthers are 23.3% on the power play and 88.2% on the penalty kill.

Match to watch? Barkov excelled both offensively and defensively in the postseason with 17 points in 17 games. He shut down the opponents’ best offensive players. Now, we’ll probably see a lot of Barkov and McDavid in the Cup final.

“We’ve played against a lot of good players in this series, a lot of good teams,” McDavid said. “Barkov is equally good in terms of playing both ways. He is a very, very solid player.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published on June 5, 2024.

Steven Sandor, Canadian Press