In Barkov They Trust: The Panthers, led by their captain, are headed back to the Stanley Cup Final

The entire play took eight seconds, and basically summed up why the Florida Panthers have enormous, nonstop belief in Aleksander Barkov.

Third period, Wednesday night, Game 5 of the Eastern Conference finals, game tied at 3. Barkov picks up the puck in the right corner. He skates around the end boards, as Carolina defenseman Dmitry Orlov is trying to use his entire 214-pound frame to move Barkov one direction or the other. Orlov had no chance.

Barkov stopped on a dime, turned around, ducked back toward the net and slid the puck to a place that only Florida’s Carter Verhaeghe could reach. Verhaeghe turned that pass into the winner, and with that, the Panthers were headed back to their third consecutive Stanley Cup Final.

In Barky They Trusted. Again.

“Such a great player,” Verhaeghe said. “It was such a great play by him. It was all him.”

The funny part is that Barkov would hate hearing such praise, and he surely would never say anything like that about himself. He is a most unassuming superstar, someone who doesn’t care about the spotlight, someone who was legitimately surprised when fans recognized him last year at a Florida Atlantic basketball game in Boca Raton — about 20 minutes north of where the Panthers play their home games.

But he is Florida’s best player. And he has led the defending Stanley Cup champions back to the title round for a third consecutive season. This year’s matchup is a rematch: Florida is playing Edmonton for the second straight year, after beating the Oilers in seven games last year.

“He’s one of the best in the world at that, if not the best,” Florida forward Sam Reinhart said of Barkov’s play to set up the gamewinner in the East clincher. “He’s got so much strength. Big players make big plays at the biggest moments when you need them, and he’s certainly the leader of this team.”

The Florida-Edmonton matchup will be the 11th title-round rematch in the Stanley Cup era and the first since Pittsburgh and Detroit played for the trophy in 2008 and 2009.

“The most important step is ahead of us,” goalie Sergei Bobrovsky said.

The Panthers are the ninth franchise in NHL history to make the Stanley Cup Final in at least three consecutive seasons. Barkov became the first Finnish captain to get the honor of having the inaugural hoist of the Cup when Florida won the title last year, and he was there through a lot of lean years for the Panthers. Forget the Cup final; the Panthers couldn’t make the playoffs for much of their history.

That seems so long ago now. No team has played more postseason games in the last four years than the Panthers, and there’s at least four more games this season left to go.

“I think it was a long time coming,” Barkov said. “Obviously, there’s been a lot of work put in by this organization to become better and reach the level where we want to win Stanley Cups, we want to compete for Stanley Cups every single year. There are 31 other teams in the league and it’s hard every single year. They want to do that too, so it’s not easy. But we’ve managed to do it three years in a row, which is, I think, an incredible achievement so far.”

Aaron Ekblad is in his 11th season as a Panther — one behind Barkov — and he remembers those tough times. Florida once missed the playoffs by a point during their tenure; some years, they missed by five or six wins. They weren’t terrible. They just weren’t that good.

But he remembers why he always remained steadfast in the belief that the franchise would get to this point.

“We’ve always had Sasha Barkov,” Ekblad said. “So, there was always hope, especially in those down years. We always had Barky to lead the way.”

He led then. He led now. And another trip to the final awaits.

___

AP NHL playoffs: https://apnews.com/hub/stanley-cup and https://apnews.com/hub/nhl