The 2024 Stanley Cup Final between the Edmonton Oilers and Florida Panthers will get underway Saturday night at Amerant Bank Arena in Sunrise, FL. In advance of the start of the Final, ESPN personalities Sean McDonough, Ray Ferraro, Mark Messier and P.K. Subban joined a conference call to preview the upcoming series.
Before the call got started, ESPN announced that they have agreed to terms on a multi-year extension with Messier to continue to be a hockey analyst for them. Here’s what Mark Gross, ESPN Senior Vice President Production & Remote Events, had to say about the agreement.
“Mark Messier brings such depth and insight to our hockey coverage, and truly embodies what it means to be the ultimate team player. As a first-ballot Hockey Hall of Famer with six Stanley Cups, he’s been a tremendous addition to our studio coverage, and we’re thrilled to reach a contract extension with a true NHL legend.”
McDonough and Ferraro along with reporter Emily Kaplan will once again be the lead broadcasting team for the Stanley Cup Final on ABC. Messier and Subban will join Steve Levy in the studio. Here are our three takeaways from the media call that lasted over an hour.
Second Time Around Easier
The 2024 Stanley Cup Final marks the second go around for ESPN handling the broadcasting duties. As you might expect, the experience from before will make things easier on the team this time around. Here’s McDonough on being more experienced coming into this Final.
“The second time around is just going to be easier for all of us given that we have done this before. We’ve now worked together for three years. I think we know all the people involved. We know where the booths are. Ray knew that stuff already anyway because he’d been involved in it continuously with his work up in Canada. A lot of great story lines. One of the issues with hockey, as we know, there’s not always a lot of time to tell the stories, but we’ll do the best we can. I just think it’s going to be a scintillating final.”
Ferraro echoed McDonough that things will be easier this time. But once the series gets started, it’s the same game Ferraro knows and loves.
“It’s easier the second time to know what to expect. The Final is different. There’s just more of everything in and around the games. Yet when the puck hits the ice, it’s like, from my perspective, it’s just the game – what I see, what we’re able to relate, what we’re able to show back, can we do it quick enough and efficient enough to get the best looks and the best replays and the best as many stories as we can that are of interest.”
That will be one of the challenges the team will face. How much interest will there be for fans at large in the United States? They have to be able to tell as many of the stories as possible while keeping the focus on the action on the ice while making it interesting for the average fan. While the Panthers rise to a second-straight Final is a great story, it might not interest the average fan. But perhaps the superstar factor could do that. Enter Connor McDavid.
McDavid Factor
The 2024 Stanley Cup Final will feature the game’s best player in the prime of his career. McDavid gets his first crack at the Final against an experienced Panthers’ team. While he is a known commodity to hardcore fans, he may not be as well known to the average sports fan. His influence could draw in new fans. The crew all discussed what his influence to this series could be.
Subban believes having McDavid on the biggest stage on ESPN will be a huge deal. Let him explain.
“I’d like to say it’s not that important because there’s so many great, talented players in the game, but I really believe it is important. Any time you have your best player or your best players on a world-class stage like the Stanley Cup Final, it’s the epitome of what the league wants. That’s what you want. You want to have your best players in the final.”
“For ESPN to have the Finals this year and to have Connor McDavid in it is a massive deal for the NHL. Make no doubt about it, he is the most talented player that I’ve ever seen play the game, that I’ve ever played against. He really is. And now he has the opportunity to really do something that, outside of the people in Edmonton, I think that everybody looks at the numbers and the stats, this is a series that Florida – I don’t think you can consider Florida the underdog in the series with the way their team has played and where their team is at right now.”
“So, I think it’s a huge deal for the league to have Connor McDavid on this stage. Outside of us highlighting how great he has been throughout his career and the great things that he’ll do in this series, he’s got to do that himself, and I think he’s going to show the world how great he is, just like he did at the All-Star Game when people were doubting whether he was still the best player in the world right now. I can’t believe people still doubt that, but he is great. I think it’s a huge deal for the NHL having him there.”
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Messier was asked a follow up about McDavid and if he could ever reach the status of Wayne Gretzky, the game’s greatest player. Not only was Greztky great on the ice, he was a celebrity off it. Could McDavid reach that kind of status in the future? Here’s Messier’s interesting response.
“It’s a tough one always comparing players of different generations. So, I don’t try to do that. I look at what they did to their peers in their generation. When you look at what Bobby Orr was able to do and how he separated himself from everybody else in his era. Of course, Wayne and the records in his era speaks for themselves, statistically the greatest athlete that ever played. The separation between him and everybody else was — I mean, it’s not — it’s incomparable.”
“Now we come to McDavid, who Ray said probably the best engineered player of all time. Having said that, he’s still got players that are – Kucherov and MacKinnon and other players in the stratosphere with him. He hasn’t separated himself the way some other players have. That doesn’t mean he’s not great and he may be the greatest technically gifted player ever physically.”
“We’re talking about how a player will be defined when he’s done. Gretz will tell you that his sole purpose obviously was to smash every record and do that. He was on a mission to do that. More important than that there, he realized that without championships, he would never be regarded as someone that went down as one of the greatest players ever. He said it himself very early on, I remember having the conversations with him. He knew he had to win.”
“He was geared in his whole career and his competitiveness and his hunger to be a Stanley Cup champion is what drove him. Game 81 with nothing to play for, and if he was on the ice, he was trying to score his fifth goal. There was never a moment in the 60 minutes that he was unrelenting in the pursuit of greatness, but that’s also what drove him to be the champion that he ultimately became.”
“That’s a long-winded way of saying that for me I look at players in their own time periods and how they were able to separate themselves from their competition, and I don’t think anybody in sports history has been able to do it to the degree that Wayne has done it.”
Bottom line is that McDavid’s presence in this series is exactly what the NHL needs at this time.
Impressive Panthers
McDavid and the Oilers will face a tall order, literally, in the Final. The Panthers are not only skilled, they are big. Their size allows them to be very hard to play against.
Up and down their lineup, there aren’t many smaller players. This means the Panthers can play and succeed with different styles. Want to play in a shootout? They can do that. Want to be physical? You play right into their hands. Can the superstars of the Oilers find a way to beat the overall depth of the Panthers?
The crew all praised the Panthers and the way they were made. Here’s a little snippet from each about what makes the Panthers so impressive.
“The thing about the Panthers I’ll take really quick is this starts above Paul Maurice,” Ferraro said. “This starts with the way the vision, the desire to build a team when Bill Zito took over as the general manager. They already had one of the highest scoring teams in the last 20 years. They went out and engineered the Tkachuk trade and traded Jonathan Huberdeau, the players they brought in, if you happened to be standing beside that team, it’s like a team of linebackers.”
“I think for Florida, I think a lot of it had to do with the fact of the season, Matthew Tkachuk coming over, really putting his fingerprint on this team, and their identity, right away it just flipped,” Subban said. “As Ray said after the trade, kind of shifting the culture in that locker room, these guys started to believe. When Paul Maurice says it’s on the players now, as a player, there’s nothing better than getting a taste of the Stanley Cup Finals. You get a taste of that, and it’s almost like you go into your summer, you’re right back into the gym, you’re right back training. It starts with Paul Maurice. He’s given — he’s passed the gavel to the players to police themselves and to show the discipline within the structure of what winning hockey looks like. They’ve all bought into that.”
“First of all, I think I mentioned pretty much all year that Florida is one of my favorite teams to watch,” Messier said. “The way they play the game, the style they play. They are very direct in their intentions. They don’t hide what their intentions are, and then they have enough belief in what their intentions are to go out and execute it. They’ve seen it all the way from the latter part of last year into the playoffs. I think they probably felt that they missed one with the injuries they had last year. Instead of getting beaten down in the war of attrition physically, it seems to embolden them. Instead of being worn down by the war of attrition mentally, they seem to be sharper and having more fun.”
“The difference between last year and this year, last year they had to really go all out at the end of the season just to make the playoffs,” McDonough said. They make the playoffs by a point, and they spent a lot of physical and emotional energy. (Maurice) said after that first series against Boston last year, they were really wiped out and beat up. It was almost to the point where everything they did after that was kind of, I don’t want to say pleasant surprise, but he used the word with Ray and me and Emily last week, it’s an accomplishment. That’s not the case anymore. They’re much healthier. Obviously they’ve had some rest in between. I think they’re a lot fresher, and therefore they’ll be better able to kind of finish the job, at least from a physical, emotional, mental standpoint.”
The 2024 Stanley Cup Final should be great hockey with no shortage of storylines. Game 1 gets underway Saturday night at 8 P.M. eastern.
