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Panthers And Oilers Fans Are Bickering Over The Crowd Size At Florida’s Stanley Cup Parade

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2025 Stanley Cup Parade celebrations in Miami with Brad Marchand

© Sam Navarro-Imagn Images


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Less than a week after the Florida Panthers beat the Edmonton Oilers 5-1 to win back-to-back Stanley Cups, the second Florida team to do that this decade, Oilers fans are still down bad. The resurgence in salty posts from Oilers fans came after the Florida Panthers held their Stanley Cup parade in Miami which became a point of contention among the fan bases.

As a Tampa Bay Lightning fan, I feel qualified in saying the primary issue with the Florida Panthers’ Stanley Cup parade is they didn’t do it on boats. If pro sports in Florida should’ve learned anything from Tampa Bay’s success in the NHL and NFL in recent years it is that Championship Boat Parades are better than parades with buses.

That said, Oilers fans and Canadian hockey fans in general seem unable to accept that at some point in a parade route there might be a bend in the road where there are less fans than elsewhere on the route. Because Oilers fans have latched onto this clip as evidence of the 2025 Stanley Cup parade as being the “most pathetic parade in history.”

Another person took a jab at the parade on X, saying “There’s gonna be more people at Raising Cane’s celebrating the LSU natty this week than attended the Panthers parade. The Panthers are on the verge of being a dynasty btw.”

Others have claimed that it was among the bottom 3 least attended parades in history. This person claims that around 400,000 people showed up which would put it in the bottom 3 among Anaheim and St. Louis… Somehow breezing past the fact that is Summer in South Florida and getting any crowd to show up to an outdoor activity is a monumental feat:

Meanwhile, if you search “Panthers parade” on X (formerly known as Twitter) you will see countless posts from proud Panthers fans who were at the Stanley Cup parade. There are plenty of posts out there but this one really caught my attention because you can get a sense of how there is a massive crowd that showed out for the Panthers:

Does this look like a parade with no fans to you? Because what I’m seeing here is a parade with fans…. Or “Dost my eyes deceive me?” — Robin Williams as Genie — William Shakespeare.

I’m siding with the Florida Panthers and their fans on this one… Would the Edmonton Oilers have turned out a larger crowd for a Stanley Cup parade? Of course. But a Canadian team hasn’t won the Cup since 1993 and Edmonton hasn’t won it since 1990.

For those keeping score at home, that is 12,814 days since the Edmonton Oilers have won a Stanley Cup. Or 1,107,129,600 seconds since they were able to celebrate winning it all. Meanwhile, the state of Florida has two teams that have won back-to-back Stanley Cups in this decade alone. So I fully understand why Edmonton fans be saltier than the Great Salt Lake.