Head Coach Paul Maurice sees qualities from each of the three teams Florida has defeated in Vegas
The Florida Panthers arrived for work on Tuesday morning at FLA Live Arena with a new rival to focus on.
Five days had passed since the Cats clinched their spot in the Stanley Cup Final by sweeping the Carolina Hurricanes.
There are still another five days to wait for Game 1 of the Stanley Cup Final, but now the Panthers know who they'll be facing.
Monday night the Vegas Golden Knights defeated the Dallas Stars 6-0 in Game 6 of the Western Conference Final, winning the series 4-2.
That means the 2023 Stanley Cup Champion will come from either Las Vegas or South Florida.
Take that, hockey establishment.
The Panthers didn't hold a formal practice on Tuesday, but Head Coach Paul Maurice spoke to the media and was asked about finally having an opponent to begin planning for.
"I think you're going to see components in Vegas' game that you've already seen in each series," Maurice said, referencing Florida's first three playoff opponents.
The eight-seed Panthers shocked the world by upsetting the Presidents' Trophy-winning Boston Bruins in seven games before dismantling the powerhouse duo of Toronto and Carolina in a total of nine games between the second and third rounds.
In facing such strong teams while maneuvering their way to the Final, Florida has seen a lot in their Eastern Conference adversaries that they're going to end up facing in the Golden Knights.
"There's a tremendous number of similarities between (Vegas and) Boston," Maurice explained. "They also have the dynamic offensive players, much like Toronto does, and some of the things they can do in small areas, and they do play hard gap game like Carolina does, so in each of our three opponents we will find pieces of Vegas' game."
Coming from Winnipeg, where he coached for nine seasons, Maurice is very familiar with the Golden Knights.
The franchise is only six years old, and yet they've made the playoffs five times and have reached the conference final in all but one of those seasons.
Maurice faced Vegas in the 2018 Western Conference Final, losing to the expansion Golden Knights in five games.
Vegas went on to lose to Washington in the Stanley Cup Final, their only appearance in the championship series before this year.
Overall, that's a pretty impressive track record for such a young franchise, one that has found ways to improve and build on an incredibly strong foundation while remaining one of the better teams in their conference.
"They've added that top end (talent) that you don't get in the Expansion Draft, but you can still get, clearly, very strong players," Maurice said.
It's all about knowing your team, identifying particular areas of that could be better and working to improve those parts of the roster.
Vegas has followed that formula quite well.
"They pick people specific to their needs," Maurice said. "So they got a number one center (in Jack Eichel) and that makes them so much deeper at center ice, because they had good centermen, but their four (centers) skate so very, very well. (They add a) pure leader, shooter in Mark Stone, bringing that driver into your room, and then a number one defenseman (in Alex Pietrangelo), so they found their needs and filled them very well."
Deep, talented and battle tested, the Golden Knights are going to be the latest in a series of extremely difficult postseason challenges for the Panthers.
So far the Cats have passed each test with flying colors.
We'll see if they can keep the momentum going and do something neither of these franchises has done yet.
There are no Stanley Cup Championship banners hanging in Sunrise or on the Vegas Strip.
For one of these teams, and cities, that's about to change.