Oilers, Panthers could join short list of teams to win from fall to summer in same NHL season

It's officially summer, and the best two teams in hockey during the winter months of the 2023-24 NHL season are still playing.

Whichever team wins Game 6 — and Game 7, if necessary — of the Stanley Cup final between the Edmonton Oilers and Florida Panthers that resumes in Alberta on Friday night will not only be a team for all time as hockey's champion. It will be a rare team for all seasons, too.

Let's explain: Summer began in the Northern Hemisphere on Thursday. That makes this the fourth time in the last five years that the NHL season has stretched into the summer months and the sixth time that it's happened in league history.

But the Panthers or Oilers — or both — will join a very short list of teams to win games in fall, winter, spring and summer in the same NHL season.

"We're incredibly lucky, for sure," Panthers forward Ryan Lomberg said. "We were talking about the other day, that teams that haven't made the playoffs have been at home for a couple months now."

The first two instances of Cup final games getting played in summer — 1995 and 2013 — were because those seasons started late due to labour strife and no games were played in the fall. The 2019-20 season started in the fall 2019 and ended in the fall 2020, but saw no games played in spring 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic. The 2020-21 season stretched into summer but didn't start until mid-January so, again, no fall games were played.

There have been two teams in NHL history — the 2021-22 Colorado Avalanche and Tampa Bay Lightning — to win games in fall, winter, spring and summer in the same season. That year's schedule saw a slew of postponements because of the pandemic and the Stanley Cup final stretched into the summer. Colorado went 2-1, Tampa Bay