Pressure mounts on Panthers as they try to avoid historic Stanley Cup collapse

SUNRISE, Fla. – A piece of advice if you’re a Florida Panthers player over what will surely be two long, excruciating off days before Game 6: Stay off the internet, don’t look at X, don’t scroll Instagram, don’t even turn on the TV or radio.

The outside noise will be loud and the only way to escape it will be to completely tune it out and pretend it’s not there.

The Panthers still have a 3-2 series lead over the Edmonton Oilers in the Stanley Cup Final, but make no mistake, as much as coach Paul Maurice tried to convince us that “absolutely nothing has changed for our situation in the last two games except we learned some things,” the momentum has completely shifted in this series, the pressure is squarely on the Panthers as they head back to Edmonton. The biggest thing the Panthers have going against them is they don’t possess Connor McDavid, who has completely taken over this final round with back-to-back four-point games.

The danger is if the Panthers start thinking about history. Teams with a 3-0 series lead in a best-of-seven Stanley Cup Final own an all-time record of 27-1. The only team in NHL history to choke away a 3-0 Cup Final series lead was the 1942 Detroit Red Wings at the hands of the Toronto Maple Leafs.

“The Oilers are thinking about history, and that’s a good thing, but if the Panthers start thinking about it, it’s a very bad thing,” said ABC color analyst Ray Ferraro, who played 1,258 games in his NHL career, after Tuesday’s 5-3 Oilers win. “I’m no coach. But I would say, ‘Guys, whatever we hear, let’s not hear it. Let’s not listen to it. Let’s not evaluate it. We’re going to look at the film. We’ll talk about what we need to fix.’

“But I think you have to almost pull in tight and go, ‘It is us against everybody.’ ”

Everything that was going right for the Panthers in the first three games of this series has completely turned upside down.

They’re taking undisciplined, momentum-stopping penalties and are unable to kill them, which happened twice on Tuesday. They’re giving up short-handed goals, which happened almost immediately in Game 5 for the second consecutive game. They’re unable to stymie the sport’s most electrifying player in McDavid, who has gone into video-game mode and has 42 points in the playoffs. And Sergei Bobrovsky, their impenetrable goaltender in the first eight periods of this series, has given up 11 goals in the past 5½ periods he has played.

Walking around a quiet Panthers locker room after the team couldn’t complete a comeback from a pair of three-goal deficits Tuesday, it was clear there’s an uptightness and an uneasiness about what is going on here – the prospect of not getting this done Friday night in Edmonton and potentially blowing all their hard work throughout the postseason and in the beginning of this series, which feels like it started two months ago.

“It’s tough, especially at this stage of where you’re at in the series,” said Matthew Tkachuk, who scored for the first time since May 22. “We’ve got another crack at it on Friday. We did a really good job at the beginning of the series of building that lead, so really nothing changes from tonight’s mindset. We’re up 3-2 going back to Edmonton.”

For the Panthers to win, Maurice said they must stay out of the box.

Every time they pushed in Game 5, they took a penalty. The Panthers went the final 14:01 of the first period without a shot but were so close to getting out of the period down only a goal after Connor Brown scored short-handed, then Niko Mikkola took an interference penalty and gave Edmonton’s vaunted power play 2 minutes of man-advantage time on fresh ice to open the second.

Zach Hyman scored with 2 seconds left in the power play. Then the Panthers pulled within two and were all over the Oilers when Kyle Okposo took a hooking penalty. Corey Perry scored with 8 seconds left in the power play as Edmonton reclaimed its three-goal lead.

Even in the third period after Oliver Ekman-Larsson cut the deficit to one, Dmitry Kulikov’s tripping penalty with 7:32 left ate up two valuable minutes.

“We’ve got to find a way to stay out of the penalty box. That’s about it,” Maurice said.

Maurice was tight after the game and wasn’t in his normal talkative mood. He said he didn’t mind the Panthers’ game and thought they were strong 5-on-5. But the two power-play goals against, the short-handed goal and McDavid did them in.

“We should be intensely interested in the next one,” Maurice said. “I’m not pumping tires. I’m not rubbing backs. I don’t think we need that at all. Everybody feels probably exactly the way I do right now. I’m not feeling deflated. Neither is the hockey team. They’re not feeling deflated. A little grumpy.”

The Panthers took the positives from the game, like how they played in the second half when they spent several shifts trying to mount a comeback. It’s something to build off of, they said, as was Tkachuk’s performance.

Tkachuk spoiled us last postseason with big goal after big goal. He hasn’t been remotely the same this postseason. He scored only his second goal in the past 16 games in the second period, he set up Ekman-Larsson’s goal, he was constantly going to the inside and playing physically and even saved an empty-net goal by Hyman with a desperation dive to swipe the puck from the goal line before McDavid buried the dagger.

“That goal seemed to ignite him,” Ferraro said. “That’s Tkachuk. He’d been playing, in my opinion, a little bit conservatively. He’s been trying to be so disciplined and conservative, but he’s got to get up closer to the edge. He’s such an emotional bellwether for them and they need that, and I thought he was awesome in the second half.”

The Panthers seemed to get a spark in the second period when Maurice flipped Carter Verhaeghe and Evan Rodrigues, reuniting Verhaeghe with Aleksander Barkov and Sam Reinhart and Rodrigues with Sam Bennett and Tkachuk. Maurice made the initial switch in the third period of Game 3 before anything went haywire in the series. The Panthers were then dominated, so he flipped it back and they looked more like themselves.

The other thing he did in the third was elevate Ekman-Larsson, who was outstanding. Perhaps this is more stuff to build on for Game 6.

“We’re a good road team, so we’re going to go in there and play with confidence and play our game and go for it,” Ekman-Larsson said.

“We’ve got to win one game, simple as that,” Rodrigues said. “Go out there, got to win one game. That’s our mindset and that’s what we’re going to go do.”

“It’s not an elimination game for us,” Tkachuk said. “We’re going up there with a 3-2 series lead. Just got to take care of business like we did in Game 3.”

Maurice doesn’t believe in momentum from game to game in the playoffs.

But there’s no doubt the Oilers, who have spent this entire season rallying back from the dead, are feeling capable of doing it again.

And that has to be a concern for the Panthers.

“I don’t know if this is just me or not, but again, this group has just believed in this the whole way,” Oilers defenseman Mattias Ekholm said. “I don’t know that there’s been any pressure on us or whatnot. … We believe we’re going to pull this off.”