Panthers manage to re-sign Brad Marchand, Aaron Ekblad after Stanley Cup triumph
With the help of their state not having income tax, Florida re-signed forward Brad Marchand and defenseman Aaron Ekblad on Monday, a day before the start of NHL free agency.
Marchand, 37, signed a six-year contract with a $5.25 million average annual value, while Ekblad, 29, got an eight-year contract with a $6.1 million AAV.
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Ekblad, who likely could've commanded significantly more on the open market, was the No. 1 overall pick by the Panthers in the 2014 NHL Draft and has been a stalwart ever since, going from Calder Trophy winner to helping the team to back-to-back Cup wins and three straight Cup Final appearances.
Aaron Ekblad lifting the Stanley Cup
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The 11-year veteran, a two-time All-Star, is also the first-ever Panthers defenseman to reach 300 points in his career.
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Marchand was also with one team for his entire career until the Bruins traded him during the 2024-25 season to the Panthers.
The Athletic previously reported that the Bruins were interested in a reunion with Marchand if he reached free agency, and that the Maple Leafs were potential suitors.
Marchand was part of the Bruins team that won the 2011 Stanley Cup in his second year in the league.
And he was a huge reason the Panthers were able to repeat this season, putting up 10 goals and 10 assists in 23 playoff games.
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Brad Marchand in game 5 of the Stanley Cup
NHLI via Getty Images
The Panthers were also able to re-sign Conn Smythe winner Sam Bennett to an eight-year, $64 million deal.
The band is back together in South Florida, and a dynasty could be in the offing.
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NBC Sports
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Fox Sports
35 minutes ago
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A pair of Makars on the Avalanche roster? Taylor hopes to one day join older brother Cale
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New York Times
an hour ago
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Why the Golden Knights continue to be the NHL's ultimate ‘home run' team
LAS VEGAS — In the summer of 2023, shortly after the Vegas Golden Knights won the Stanley Cup, team owner Bill Foley approached the trophy in his office at the team's practice facility. The Cup had just returned from the engraving in Montreal, and Foley anticipated seeing his name etched into the silver and nickel alloy for the first time. Advertisement 'I looked at it and I'm thinking, 'Where is my name?'' Foley recalled. 'Then I realized, oh, I'm the first name.' It's a moment he'll never forget. Foley, 80, has a long, distinguished career as a businessman. He founded the insurance giant Fidelity National Financial in 1984, owns major holdings companies, a 40,000-acre ranch resort in Montana and more than two dozen wineries and vineyards across the United States, France and New Zealand. That's only a small portion of his business ventures over the decades. None of it compares to winning the Stanley Cup and parading it down the world-famous Las Vegas Strip. 'Sports are bigger than what you do in business,' Foley told The Athletic this week. 'They really are. We beat the best of the best. We had that gigantic celebration. Guys went crazy. It was just an amazing experience. I've never had that type of experience.' Foley brought his successful all-in business approach to the world of sports ownership. Since entering the league in 2017, the Golden Knights have won four division titles, made four trips to the conference finals and two to the Stanley Cup Final, and won the championship in 2023. To the ire of many fans across the NHL, Vegas has also become one of the premier destinations for players. That was on display once again this week, when the Golden Knights acquired Mitch Marner in a sign-and-trade that landed the 100-point winger in Vegas with an eight-year, $96 million contract. Marner was born and raised near the hockey hotbed of Toronto, and was a star for his hometown Maple Leafs for nine years. Then, approaching unrestricted free agency for the first time in his career, he declined the chance to be courted by teams to sign with Vegas — and he's not alone in that decision. The Golden Knights have operated aggressively when it comes to roster-building, pushing the limits of the salary cap and making splashy trades to acquire big-name players. For the most part, those deals have worked out in their favor. Advertisement There was the trade for Montreal captain Max Pacioretty in 2018, followed by the signing of Paul Stastny, trading for Mark Stone, signing of Alex Pietrangelo, and trading for Jack Eichel, Tomas Hertl and Noah Hanifin. The list goes on. Whether it's through trades or free agency, the Golden Knights almost always get their guy. They've operated with an aggression rarely seen by other NHL organizations, and that all starts at the top with Foley. 'We will always go for the home run,' he said. 'That's just part of the team's philosophy, and I'm completely in favor of it and I back it all the way.' It's always been that way, even when the Golden Knights were just a concept in Foley's mind. When he first got the idea to purchase an NHL expansion franchise, he didn't look at the traditional markets. Foley saw Las Vegas as an opportunity, as a vibrant, growing city that had yet to experience major professional sports. He was spot-on. Not only have the Golden Knights been a roaring success — selling out every regular-season and playoff game in the team's eight-year history — but they also opened the eyes of other professional leagues. The NFL's Raiders weren't far behind, announcing they'd relocate to Las Vegas in 2017. The WNBA's San Antonio Stars followed suit, moving to Las Vegas in 2018. The team rebranded as the Aces, and has already won two WNBA titles. The latest team to make the move is the MLB's Oakland A's, who recently broke ground on a $1.75 billion ballpark at a site not far from T-Mobile Arena. In Las Vegas, Foley saw an untapped sports market hungry for a team to call its own. He also saw a world-famous city that professional athletes would flock to. 'The city itself, obviously everyone just thinks of it as the Strip and there's so much more to it,' Marner said during his introductory press conference on Wednesday when describing what drew him to Vegas. 'I was lucky enough to talk to (Toronto teammates and former Golden Knights Ryan Reaves and Max Pacioretty) about everything off of the Strip, living-wise, schooling-wise, just how tight-knit the communities are, and privacy-wise, too. A lot of things checked our boxes.' Advertisement Before the NHL ever awarded the expansion franchise to the city, Foley and his team conducted a study of Las Vegas in comparison to other NHL cities. 'We did an analysis of the cost of living across every NHL city,' Foley said. 'It came back with Vegas being either the best or the second-best in almost every category, whether it's affordable housing, safety, transportation systems. If you compare Vegas to every other major city, it's so easy to get around.' Vegas' temperate weather during the winter months of the NHL season also makes it an attractive landing spot. So do the dozens of world-class golf courses with luscious, green fairways year-round. Nevada doesn't have a state income tax, so players take home more of their money, and there's the obvious draw of living in the entertainment capital of the world. Then there's the spectacle that is T-Mobile Arena, which quickly became one of the best atmospheres in the league, and City National Arena, the team's state-of-the-art practice facility in the suburb of Summerlin, where most of the players live. Foley included everything he could think of to create a self-contained environment, from a full-time chef to medical and physical therapy centers inside the facility. He invests in making the players' lives easier. There are simple gestures, such as purchasing a new ping-pong table for the team gym the moment a player mentioned the absence of one, or having the players' cars washed in the parking lot while they practice. There are also major financial commitments, such as purchasing an AHL expansion franchise (the Henderson Silver Knights) in 2020 and building a facility similar to City National Arena in Henderson. All of that plays a major role in the Golden Knights' overall strategy. It's one thing to be aggressive in the trade market, but if the players don't want to stay once they're here, you can waste a lot of trade capital. 'Players don't want to leave,' Foley said. 'Once they get here, and they see our facilities and where we play, and they see the way we take care of our players, scouts and coaches, and how everyone is all in, they don't want to leave.' Advertisement That allows the Golden Knights to regularly trade for top players on expiring contracts with full confidence that they'll sign a long-term deal. Stone and Hanifin are the best examples, but there have been plenty of others over the years. It has also led to some players trying to force their way to Vegas by using their no-movement clauses and other forms of leverage. Calgary defenseman Rasmus Andersson may be doing that at this very moment, according to a report by Pierre LeBrun of The Athletic. Andersson is on an expiring contract, and Calgary may opt to trade him. According to LeBrun, the Golden Knights, Senators, Blue Jackets and Kings all showed interest in acquiring him, but because Andersson is only reportedly interested in talking about a long-term extension with Vegas, the hands of the Flames' front office are a bit tied. Winning is the most important ingredient. All of these things could be true about the city of Las Vegas and the impressive facilities, but it wouldn't be an attractive landing spot if the Golden Knights were finishing at the bottom of the Pacific Division every year. Players want to win, and they want to play for a team with ownership and management committed to winning. 'This team, since it entered the league, has really pushed the boundaries to be that winning team,' Marner said Tuesday. 'That's where I want to be. I want to be in a winning situation.' The Golden Knights' front office, headed by president of hockey operations George McPhee and general manager Kelly McCrimmon, has pushed so many boundaries that several of them won't exist under the new collective bargaining agreement that begins in 2026-27. Vegas hasn't just been daring; it's been incredibly creative when it comes to finding small edges, often to the scorn of fans. Vegas was the first team to come up with the idea of using a third team as a conduit in a trade to retain salary and minimize a player's cap hit at his eventual destination. Vegas made the first trade of that type in February 2018, retaining 40 percent of Derick Brassard's cap hit as he went from Ottawa to Pittsburgh. That concept has now become common at the NHL trade deadline, but it will be against the rules in the new CBA. Advertisement The Golden Knights worked the 2017 expansion draft in a way never seen before, or since. 'We spent so much time in mock drafts really getting to know every other team and what was vulnerable on each team,' Foley explained. 'We paid our franchise fee a little bit early so we could start acquiring players at the deadline, and started doing deals right away. Then in the expansion draft, we didn't do the traditional type of transactions where we just picked a player.' The Golden Knights made 10 trades as part of their expansion draft picks, acquiring eight extra draft picks (including three first-round picks) and seven additional players. In Seattle's expansion draft under the same rules four years later, the Kraken didn't make a single trade or acquire a single draft pick. Vegas took on bad contracts, like David Clarkson ($5.25 million cap hit) and Mikhail Grabovski ($5 million cap hit), neither of whom played a game for the team, but netted Vegas two first-round picks and a second-round pick. Seattle made no such moves. That was just the beginning, as the Golden Knights have continually found ways to use the NHL's salary cap rules to their advantage over the years. 'We're aggressive with our salary cap,' McCrimmon said. 'That's how we do business, and I think it's led us to a lot of good outcomes by doing it that way.' Vegas has appropriately pushed its chips all in at every opportunity since entering the league. It has already traded 11 first-round picks (either the pick itself or a prospect selected in the first round) in the pursuit of improving the current roster. 'We never want to rebuild,' Foley said. 'We just want to retool. We have to always stay ahead of the power curve, because once you get into rebuilding mode, it's so hard to get out of it. Look at Buffalo. They've had so many good draft picks and so on, and they're still in rebuilding mode. The Blackhawks are trying hard now. It's not easy.' Advertisement 'We started out thinking aggressively from day one,' said Foley, who has since purchased several soccer teams, including AFC Bournemouth of the English Premier League, and has used the same formula to make them successful. 'I kind of used the VGK playbook,' he said. 'I got over there and the infrastructure was really inadequate, so the first thing we did was, we immediately started building this high-performance center, which we just opened this past spring and is probably one of the best in the Premier League.' The club has improved in the EPL standings for three straight years since Foley purchased it. He now owns or has an ownership stake in three other soccer teams: FC Lorient in France, Hibernian FC in Scotland and an expansion club in Auckland, New Zealand. He enjoys the challenge of professional sports and approaches the test with a rare aggression. Perhaps Foley's most famous proclamation came in February of 2016 — before his NHL franchise even had a team name or logo — when he boldly predicted, 'Playoffs in three; Cup in six. Period, no excuses, that's the standard. I consider that being very patient.' It didn't take the Golden Knights three years to make the playoffs. They've been to the postseason in seven of their eight seasons. They won the Stanley Cup in their sixth season. Foley doesn't have any more bold predictions at the moment, but he is hungry for another championship and hopes Marner will help. He flew into Las Vegas from one of his Northern California wineries on Tuesday afternoon to meet the Golden Knights' newest star acquisition. 'It's pretty exciting,' he said. 'I'm looking forward to it.' (Top photo of Bill Foley: Ethan Miller / Getty Images)
