Ancient Rat Can't Stop Scoring
Brad Marchand has the Oilers on the brink as the Panthers take a 3-2 lead in the Stanley Cup Final
Brad Marchand, 37, has scored 10 goals these playoffs and six in this Final. If you asked me to sum up his 2025 playoff run with one stat about his goals, here it is: Seven of the 10 have given the Panthers the lead.
His pair in Game 5 led Florida to a 3-2 series lead over the Oilers as he joined Mario Lemieux as the only two players in the past 59 years to score five goals in multiple Stanley Cup Finals.
Marchand now has 13 career goals in the Final, making him one of 17 players in the 107-year history of the NHL to accomplish that feat (and one of seven in the League’s expansion era).
His six goals against the Oilers are the the most by any player in a Final since 1988. What would a young Marchand think of all of this?
“Man, that guy’s good looking.”
Marchand has always been known to joke around, but there’s a legitimate lesson to learn from him when it comes to lightheartedness, sustained passion and proficiency, and career longevity. It’s all connected, the way he respects this game and has had such top tier longevity without ever getting lost in his own sauce or taking himself even remotely seriously. It’s a feature not a bug, his success is a byproduct of his attitude, not happening despite it.
His attitude is exactly why he could fit in this specific role with the Panthers and score six goals in the Final as a third-liner. He got to Florida, walked into the locker room, and joked he’d be lucky to crack the lineup. He didn’t just know his place, he embraced his place on the third line after playing top minutes captaining the Bruins, the one team he played his entire career with up until now.
It was a step back in terms of personal responsibility, but he clearly saw the Panthers’ full-team vision and accepted a new role without a complaint. Whatever wins, right?
Marchand’s Players’ Tribune article from 2018 has resurfaced recently, and it couldn’t be more relevant.
I know there’s a lot of people who don’t like it, and I will be the first to tell you that it’s a fine line. I have done things that have stepped over that line, and I’ve paid the price for it. But you know what? There’s a lot of people out there in the hockey world who love to say, “Winning is everything. It’s the only thing.”
But do they really mean it? How far are they willing to go? Maybe it was my size, or just the way I was born, but I’ve always felt like you have to be willing to do anything — literally anything — in order to win. Even if that means being hated. Even if it means carrying around some baggage.
If I played the game any other way, you absolutely would not know my name. You wouldn’t care enough to hate me, because I wouldn’t be in the NHL. The way I played the game got me noticed by junior teams, and it got me drafted by the Boston Bruins at 5’9”.
Marchand is willing to do whatever it takes, and the meaning of “whatever it takes” has evolved as he has over the years. Remember the licking? Remember the questionable slew foots (slew feet?)? Remember the overt and incessant instigating?
Now all that looks more like, well, scoring goals.