The Florida Panthers spent 15 minutes on their bench on Tuesday watching the Carolina Hurricanes celebrate the Stanley Cup they won in June. Nobody made them do it. Paul Maurice arranged it deliberately, and he had to go out of his way to make it happen.
“We have a history with Florida of supporting celebrations of players and certainly championships for teams, and we want to be a part of it. We believe it’s right for the league,” Maurice said beforehand. “And yeah, we’re going to go up probably before they do to be a part of it, to show our respect for the great accomplishment.”
The logistics were the tricky part. The visiting bench at Lenovo Center isn’t connected to the away dressing room, which meant Florida’s players had to skate out from a corner of the arena several minutes early so they weren’t cutting across the ceremony. Maurice also checked with Carolina first, aware that it isn’t always welcome.
“It’s kind of a private thing, so we’ll check with Carolina,” he said on Monday. “Sometimes the other team doesn’t necessarily want you on the bench.”
Do visiting teams watch banner raisings?
Florida has firsthand evidence of how these things normally go. When the Panthers raised their own Cup banners in 2024 and 2025, the Boston Bruins and Chicago Blackhawks largely stayed in their dressing rooms rather than come out and watch. Maurice’s view is that the league is better served by the opposite approach.
“We believe it’s important for the League, for our players to appreciate the successes of the other players,” he said.
The reaction to that has been almost entirely positive.
“Damn right, huge respect to this. Support them raising the banner and then go win the game,” one fan wrote.
“Class act. Always has been,” another added, while a third simply called him the best head coach in the league.
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So the Panthers watched all of it. The introductions, captain Jordan Staal carrying the Cup out and setting it down at center ice, the Storm Surge, the team photo, the banner going up. Maurice had no complaints about the length of it afterwards.
“You get a chance to see what you want so bad,” Maurice said, per NHL.com. “We think it’s really important that the teams respect each other for those achievements, whether it’s an individual player hitting a milestone or certainly a Stanley Cup. They’ve earned the right to have as long a ceremony as they wanted, and it was well done.”
Then his team did exactly what that first fan suggested. Gustav Forsling scored with 4.3 seconds left in overtime to give Florida a 1-0 win.
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