Florida Panthers forward Evan Rodrigues will be keeping his own blog throughout the 2024 Stanley Cup Final against the Edmonton Oilers. He will check in regularly with behind-the-scenes access.
In his second entry, Rodrigues discusses the Panthers’ 3-0 win against the Oilers in Game 1 at Amerant Bank Arena on Saturday, the pregame atmosphere, and scoring in his first career Cup Final game.
Heading into Game 1, I had a pretty normal day, a pretty good day. I got a good nap in. It’s something that you think about. You’re going to be so excited and sometimes it’s hard to fall asleep, but I had a good nap, went through the stuff I do all year. It’s why you play 100 games before this. You have your routine so when you get to a big game like this you know what you do. You do the same thing you did all year, previous years, what you’ve done before. So, it was a pretty good day.
It was a cool feeling getting out there for Game 1. It was a little bit of what I expected, but coming out of that tunnel, you never know what you’re going to feel. Then the touch of bringing the (Stanley) Cup onto the ice wasn’t something I was expecting. I thought that was really cool and was a nice touch. It definitely lived up to the hype.
There were a couple of moments, a couple of songs that were being played that I was really enjoying at certain points of the game. If you did an iso-cam on me, you’d see I was bumping to a couple of them in the defensive zone. Sum 41’s “Fatlip,” when that came on, I was kind of feeling it a little bit.
After the first couple of shifts, I almost took a deep breath and settled into the game. I was in the moment. I put a smile on my face. It’s what you dream of. It wasn’t perfect at the beginning, but as the game went on, it started to really settle in. It was a big win for us.
Yeah, my first Cup Final goal, it was such a bang-bang play that I didn’t really have time to react. The puck went in, and I was like, ‘I’ve got to get to [Sam Bennett],’ because I don’t even know how he made the play. It kind of happened quickly and I was happy it went in. It wasn’t one of those plays where you make a move and things are kind of turning over and you think it’s coming. It just showed up in front of me, went in, and obviously happy it did.
