The Eagles showed everyone how to handle the pressure of playing in Philly. The Flyers can, too.

One of the most interesting streaks in sports lived on Wednesday night. The Florida Panthers beat the Carolina Hurricanes, 5-3, in Game 5 of the NHL’s Eastern Conference finals, which meant the Panthers were heading back to the Stanley Cup Final for the third straight year. Which meant that there would be a team from the Sunshine State in the Cup Final for the sixth straight year. It was the Tampa Bay Lightning from 2020 through 2022. It has been the Panthers in ’23, ’24, and now ’25. Gator attacks and hockey: That’s apparently what Florida does.

Those teams came by their mini-dynasties honestly, each suffering through a lengthy stretch of abject awfulness so it could accumulate draft picks, trade assets, and, eventually, high-end talent. It’s the same rite of passage through which the Flyers are putting themselves. The Panthers missed the playoffs 16 times in 18 years. The Lightning didn’t have to be quite as bad for quite as long, but they did have five top-10 draft picks in a six-year span. Couple those advantageous conditions with some smart player-personnel decisions, and both rosters were soon loaded with several of the best players in the league: Steven Stamkos, Nikita Kucherov, and Victor Hedman in Tampa; Matthew Tkachuk, Aleksander Barkov, and Sam Reinhart with Florida, among others.

There’s another advantage that the Panthers and Lightning share, though, as NHL franchises warmly ensconced within the Sun Belt, and this one is relevant to the four major franchises here: a relative lack of public interest and external pressure. Sure, Florida has its share of hockey fans (snowbirds, unite!), and sure, the teams’ players, coaches, and executives place intense pressure on themselves to succeed (as all players, coaches, and executives in major professional sports do). But compared to their counterparts in Canada or to franchises in more traditional NHL markets — Philadelphia, New York, Boston — the Panthers and Lightning simply don’t face the same scrutiny or operate in a similarly intense environment.

Ahead of Thursday night, the Edmonton Oilers were one victory away from reaching the Stanley Cup Final in back-to-back seasons, and there’s no getting around it: Their fortunes matter more in Western Canada than the Panthers’ do in South Florida.

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“The pressure is higher here, of course,” Oilers star Leon Draisaitl told reporters recently. “Just through media, fans, the expectations — that’s just the way it is. It’s a hockey country. It starts with hockey, and it ends with hockey in this country. I don’t know if teams feel they get under pressure with that. I’m not the right person to answer that. But we can handle it.”

The handling of it is the fascinating aspect of what Draisaitl said. As obvious as it is that, on the whole, it’s easier to be an NHL player in Sunrise, Fla., than it is in Toronto or Montreal or Calgary, you can overstate how tough it is to play in a city or market that cares so much. It’s possible that the Oilers have a particularly strong collective mental makeup. Maybe they’re just tougher than most teams. But it’s more likely that they’re able to overcome that pressure because they have Draisaitl, Connor McDavid, Evan Bouchard, Ryan Nugent-Hopkins, and the recently injured Zach Hyman. Their sheer talent allows them to bear the burden of representing their city and, to a degree, their nation.

Broad generalization alert: Most people don’t think this way about pressure in sports and the best way to handle it. They think about it usually in terms of mental toughness and rarely in terms of physical skill. It’s convenient and comfortable to chalk up the 76ers’ playoff failures from 2018 through 2024 to a lack of mental toughness, and no doubt, the Sixers could have used more of that. They also could have used a better bench so that their coaches could afford to take Joel Embiid off the floor for a few minutes and not worry that a double-digit lead would disappear.

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Take a more recent example: There was plenty of pressure on the Eagles ahead of the 2024 season. They were coming off an embarrassing collapse. Their coach’s future was uncertain. Their quarterback was a question mark. They overcame those obstacles, primarily, because they added Saquon Barkley, Vic Fangio, Kellen Moore, Zack Baun, Quinyon Mitchell, and Cooper DeJean, and because they already had Jalen Hurts, Nick Sirianni, A.J. Brown, DeVonta Smith, Jalen Carter, and the best offensive line in the NFL. They didn’t withstand that pressure through meditation or breathing techniques or by having every player hold his right arm over an open flame for 30 seconds after practice. They overwhelmed it with the athletic and intellectual talent on their roster and within their coaching staff.

That reality is worth remembering as the Flyers try to rebuild; as the Eagles try to defend their championship; as the Phillies try to return to, and this time win, the World Series; as the Sixers try to dig themselves out of the pit in which they’ve buried themselves. Is it harder to win in a place like Philadelphia? Yeah, it is. So? That’s the challenge and the thrill: to be smart enough about gathering the talent capable of doing it. Put it this way: Put the 2025 Florida Panthers in the Wells Fargo Center, 50-plus years since the city last held a Stanley Cup parade, and I suspect they’d do just fine.