Edmonton Oilers super fan Warren Sillanpaa has turned his front yard into a shrine to the team.JASON FRANSON/The Canadian Press
What does it say when the electric sign over Montreal’s Champlain Bridge shouts “Let’s Go Oilers!” and there are cheers in both official languages rather than an outcry?
Something is happening in Canada.
King Charles III comes to Ottawa and drops a puck – a puck! – at a simulated road hockey game.
The spring of 2025 has become a time when “Elbows Up” becomes a political statement, where Canada emerged victorious over America in the 4 Nations Face-Off, when a remarkable five Canadian National Hockey League teams reached the Stanley Cup playoffs, and when one remarkable team, the Edmonton Oilers, has now reached the final against the defending Cup champions, the Florida Panthers.
Tell us the biggest story in the land isn’t the colour of Justin Trudeau’s sneakers . . .
Canadians somehow found their “Canadian” in the weeks following Donald Trump’s presidential victory and his statement that Canada should consider becoming the 51st state. They resented that suggestion and found more resentment when Florida Governor Ron DeSantis bragged that more than three million Canadians visited his state last year and “Maybe they wanted to get a glimpse of what a Stanley Cup-winning team actually looks like” – the Panthers and the Tampa Bay Lightning having won three of the past five Stanley Cups.
In fact, American teams have won the last 30 Stanley Cups, the one year the USA failed to win being 2005, the year of the NHL lockout and no playoffs.
But now there are the Oilers, led by captain Connor McDavid, who scored the winning goal against the Americans in the 4 Nations Face-Off as well as the winning goal against the Dallas Stars Thursday night to put the Oilers into the final against the Florida Panthers for the second straight year.
Q+A: Will the Oilers win the Stanley Cup? Ask our hockey experts your playoff questions
This time, however, McDavid not only touched the conference trophy his team claimed but happily seized it – much to the dismay of some fans who buy into the silly hockey superstition that no trophy should be touched by the players until they are actually handed the Stanley Cup.
No wonder there are rink board ads this spring calling for the return “home” of Stanley. The trophy, after all, was donated back in 1893 by Governor-General Lord Stanley to honour the best team in what was then the Dominion of Canada.
No Canadian team has won it, as most fans are acutely aware, since 1993, when the Montreal Canadiens defeated the Los Angeles Kings four games to one. It would be the Canadiens’ 24th Cup victory, but no one then thought it might be the last for more than 30 years.
That now seems a very long time ago. It was the year Jean Chrétien became prime minister and Bill Clinton president. So long ago, in fact, that the film Jurassic Park showed dinosaurs were still among us.
That seems only weeks ago compared with the Canadiens’ archrival, the Toronto Maple Leafs, who last won the Cup in 1967, the year of the Six-Day War in the Middle East, Expo 67, the first successful heart transplant – no snide jokes invited after this year’s post-season burnout.
The dynasty that was the Edmonton Oilers of the 1980s won its fifth Cup in 1990, the year of the Oka standoff, Nelson Mandela’s release from prison, the Gulf War and Elijah Harper’s feather bringing down the curtain on the constitutional accord.
The Calgary Flames won it in 1989, which now seems centuries ago given that it was the year of the heartwarming Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement. A Flames victory this spring would have been a suitable farewell to that now-lost sentiment of trade co-operation between the two neighbours.
As for the Ottawa Senators, who returned to the NHL in 1992-93, their last Stanley Cup was far back in 1927, the year Charles Lindbergh flew the Spirit of St. Louis non-stop and alone from New York to Paris. It was also the year of the first long-distance television transmission – the medium that would essentially make the NHL what it is today.
There are many theories as to why no Canadian team seems capable of winning the trophy the country once dominated. Some general managers will say it is next to impossible to attract mid-career all-star players who could make the difference, the reasons for so few of them coming north being everything from the cold to lack of family privacy to high taxes.
Matt Larkin, an editor and reporter with the Daily Faceoff, calculated this week that there are six teams in the league that play in markets that have no state income taxes. These teams, he claims, have played in their conference finals nearly 63 per cent of the time since 2020.
All Canadian teams, of course, play in provinces with significant taxes.
Even so, the Edmonton Oilers, despite the high taxes, despite the cold of winter, despite the lack of privacy, have reached the final of the 2025 Stanley Cup led by two of the best players ever to play the game, McDavid and German star Leon Draisaitl.
They now have a chance to bring a sixth Stanley Cup to the ‘City of Champions.’
Send us your NHL playoff questions
This year’s playoffs will end once again in an Oilers-Panthers rematch in the Stanley Cup final, but the post-season has left its mark on all five Canadian teams that made it past 82 games.
Wondering whether Edmonton has what it takes to beat Florida in order to bring home the cup this year? What happened with the Jets, Sens and Habs? Where do the Maple Leafs go from yet another early playoff exit? Share your burning NHL playoff questions in the form below and The Globe’s hockey experts will answer them live on Tuesday, June 3, at 1 p.m. ET.