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Home > Hockey > NHL Teams > Florida Panthers
Florida Panthers
NHL, the National Hockey League is a premier professional North American Sports League played in indoor stadiums. It’s divided into two conferences, each comprising of three divisions of ice hockey teams. The league was established in 1917 in Montreal, Quebec and it is composed of 30 teams out of which 24 teams based in U.S. and 6 in Canada. They have a regular season and playoffs leading to the Stanley Cup, which is the NHL Championship final.
The Florida Panthers are a professional National ice Hockey League team who play in the Ft. Lauderdale, Miami, Florida and Florida suburb of Sunrise. In 1992, the team awarded an NHL franchise in 1992, played at the Miami Arena, and its first major stars were New York Rangers goaltender castoff John Vanbiesbrouck, rookie Rob Niedermayer, and Scott Mellanby, who scored 30 goals. They had one of the most successful first seasons of any expansion team, finishing one point below .500 and narrowly missing out on the final playoff spot in the Eastern Conference.
After missing another close brush with the playoffs in 1994-95, coach Roger Neilson was fired and replaced by Doug MacLean. They then acquired Ray Sheppard from the San Jose Sharks on the trade deadline in 1996 and they looked towards the playoffs for the first time. In the 1996 playoffs, the Panthers upset the Boston Bruins, Philadelphia Flyers, and Pittsburgh Penguins to reach the Stanley Cup Final. Their opponents, the Colorado Avalanche, swept the Panthers in four games.
The Panthers’ alternate logo is a palm tree and a hockey stick crossing one another over a sun. The Panthers moved into the National Car Rental Center, now known as BankAtlantic Center in 1998. In 1999, they acquired Pavel Bure, the Russian Rocket, in a blockbuster trade with the Vancouver Canucks. They reached the playoffs again in 2000, losing in the first round to the eventual Stanley Cup Champion New Jersey Devils.
The team slumped in the 2000-01 NHL season. Following a poor season, in 2001-02, the Panthers traded Bure to the New York Rangers on the 2002 trading deadline. In 2003, the Florida Panthers hosted the NHL All-Star Weekend. the Western Conference earned a 6-5 victory after the first overtime shootout in All-Star history.
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