Marchand lifts Stanley Cup again after 14 years, 2 losses in Final

SUNRISE, Fla. -- As the rest of the Florida Panthers swarmed to the net, to each other, to teammates they had long formed brotherships with, Brad Marchand skated slowly down the slot. He pointed to the stands.

It was only then that he joined the crowd, the pile, the players with whom his name will be engraved on the Stanley Cup, one of the last to attach himself to the writhing mass of joyful celebration. He had spent the past three months with those players, building a chemistry and a camaraderie that would result in a championship.

Those in the stands, he had spent a lifetime with.

“Just recognition, we did it,” said his wife, Katrina. “I’m going to get emotional. Just telling us as a family, we did it. It’s worth it. We did it.”

Katrina Marchand teared up, thinking about the past three months back in Boston without her husband, the past 14 years that Marchand has been working and waiting for this moment.

Coming close, but not quite. Close, but not quite.

What has this meant to her, to them?

“Everything,” Katrina Marchand said. “Absolutely everything. He works his butt off every single day and to see it come to this after what he’s been through, not seeing everything play out the way we thought it would [in Boston], this means the world.”

A year ago, Brad Marchand could never have envisioned what has happened over the past few months, believing his contract negotiations with the Boston Bruins – the team that had picked him No. 71 in the 2006 NHL Draft and for which he had played 16 seasons and won the Stanley Cup – would take, maybe, a day.

Instead, by the final seconds before the 2025 NHL Trade Deadline on March 7, he was on the move to the Panthers, once a hated rival, now his new home. It was the team he believed was most likely to win the Stanley Cup, a team that he helped get there, nearly winning the Conn Smythe in the process as the Panthers clinched with a 5-1 win in Game 6 against the Edmonton Oilers at Amerant Bank Arena on Tuesday, cementing their second consecutive championship.

When Sergei Bobrovsky handed the Cup to Marchand, it was not the first time he had lifted the Cup. He had done so in his rookie season, back in 2011, back when he had no idea how long it would take him to do it again.

There were the losses, in 2013, in 2019. It had seemed within his grasp but slipped away.

“It feels completely different,” Marchand said. “I have so much more respect and appreciation for how difficult it was to get here and how hard it is and the amount of things that need to go right to win. There’s so many great teams in the League and so much talk about this guy deserves it, that guy deserves it, and you want to see certain guys win.

“But everything has to line up perfectly. My situation is a perfect example of that. I shouldn’t have been here. But it worked out – and I’m enjoying the hell out of it.”

Marchand had 20 points (10 goals, 10 assists) in the playoffs, including six goals in the Stanley Cup Final, two of which were game-winners. He was everywhere, doing everything, a ring-leader on trips to Dairy Queen, a marvel in his series-turning overtime goal in Game 2, his ankle-breaking goals in Game 5.

“As soon as he got traded here, he chirped me in the group chat instantly for our history in the last playoffs,” said forward Sam Bennett, who did win the Conn Smythe as playoff MVP. “But what he’s meant to this team, I truly don’t think we win a Stanley Cup without him.

“His leadership, his will to win, it’s inspiring and I was telling him before every game, ‘We’re going to follow you,’ and we did. He was a dog every night and he for sure could’ve won this trophy. He’s a better player and person than I ever knew and I’m grateful I got to play with him.”

Marchand had found something over the past two months, early-20s legs, a fountain of youth. He had shed the stresses of being a captain and a leader, shed the expectations of first-line duties, shed the weight of fanning the dying embers of a franchise’s window.

In Florida, Marchand found sunshine and ease. He found a team that stunned him in its approaches to training and recovery, to balancing a demanding, grinding style with lightness and camaraderie.

The fit was perfection.

There had been so much speculation about him as a linemate for Bennett or Matthew Tkachuk, players whose in-your-face and under-your-skin personas Marchand had been copyrighting for the past 15 years.

Instead, Marchand found a spot on the third line, with Anton Lundell and Eetu Luostarinen, that became the Panthers’ best for much of the postseason, an underrated and sneaky good trio that was defensively responsible and offensively underrated.

It started to feel real as the Panthers marched through the postseason, past the Tampa Bay Lightning and Toronto Maple Leafs and Carolina Hurricanes, as they set up a rematch with the Oilers that Marchand had watched from afar last season.

This season, he was there.

They were there, his parents and his siblings and Katrina. His three kids, Sloane, Sawyer and Rue.

“There’s a bit of a dynamic where he really wanted to win a Cup for his family,” his dad, Kevin, said. “He’s got young children and they’ve not had the opportunity to experience that. So this is very meaningful to him.

“This is for them.”

But because it has happened to him before, because he has seen that close is not lifting the Cup, he didn’t want to believe too early, didn’t want to get his hopes up, his family’s hopes up, didn’t want to see them dashed.

“We’ve been through this before where it didn’t go our way. And we pictured these moments at home and losing in ’19, how upset everyone was, it was tough,” Marchand said, of losing the 2019 Cup Final to the St. Louis Blues in Game 7 on home ice at TD Garden.

“But we tried to do everything we could not to talk about it, not to jinx it, just to be in the moment. But when it was coming to a head and we knew we were going to win, seeing them up there, how special it was for them, it was pretty incredible.”

Back in 2011, Shawn Thornton was there, alongside Marchand. Thornton, now the Chief Revenue Officer of the Panthers, saw him win the Cup, saw him achieve something Marchand was too young to fully comprehend.

To see him do it again, here, he said was “surreal.”

It was the same. It was completely, completely different.

“It still felt heavy,” Marchand said. “It still felt heavy, that’s for sure.”

But the rest? A world apart.

“Just a wave hits you,” he said. “When you get to lift it for the first time, it’s just so many emotions, you get a huge adrenaline rush. So much excitement. It’s one thing to do on the road, it’s pretty incredible to do it here at home with so many people here that I love and that have been a huge impact on being part of this. It’s an incredible feeling.”

It has been 14 years since Marchand lifted the Stanley Cup. Before the Cup Final started, the 37-year-old said he was treating this run as if it were his last chance at the Cup, his last chance to catch what he had been chasing since he was a rookie.

He knows so much more, now. He has so much more.

“When he won it the first time, he thought, OK, my first year here, I won the Cup, it’s an easy thing to do,” his mother Lynn said. “But 14 years later, he realized it’s so difficult to achieve. And so this just has much more meaning behind it.”

NHL.com staff writer Tracey Myers contributed to this report.