The Edmonton Oilers find themselves yet again on the brink of elimination in the Stanley Cup Final. On Saturday, the Florida Panthers dominated Game 5 by a 5-2 score to take a 3-2 series lead and get within one win of back-to-back Stanley Cups.
"Obviously, it's not the way you draw it up," forward Ryan Nugent-Hopkins said Saturday, h/t NHL.com. "It's not the way you want to have to play every night, but we're never gonna quit on each other and we're always gonna try our hardest to get back in the game, but sometimes it's harder than other nights. We're going to Florida with a job to do, and we're going to do everything we can to do it."
The Panthers defeated the Oilers in seven games last year after Edmonton nearly completed a massive comeback, down 3-0 in the series and forcing the all-deciding Game 7. While they aren't in as deep of a hole this time, the Oilers are still in unfamiliar territory.
When was the last time the Oilers erased a deficit to win the Stanley Cup?
The Oilers are one of the NHL's most successful and storied franchises, lifting the Stanley Cup five times and playing for it on four other occasions. Edmonton fans know all too well how dominant their team was when they won those championships, so it's no surprise to find out the Oilers hardly faced a deficit in those series.
In fact, only once in the five occasions Edmonton won the Stanley Cup did it ever go down in a series. The Oilers lost Game 1 of the 1985 Stanley Cup Final to the Philadelphia Flyers before snapping off four consecutive victories to win the series.
Other than that, Edmonton has always led or been tied in a Stanley Cup Final it eventually went on to win. This year's squad would have to make franchise history as the first to ever overcome a multiple game deficit and emerge as NHL champions. But Florida is far from an easy team to face.
Can the Oilers force a Game 7 against the Panthers for the second consecutive year in the Stanley Cup Final, and can they win it all?