Blood, bias and the Battle of Florida: how the NHL’s dirtiest rivalry exposed hockey’s old-boy rot | NHL

TThe rivalry between the Florida Panthers and Tampa Bay Lightning was once a regional sideshow, a quirky clash between two southern expansion teams playing to half-empty arenas and polite indifference. But in the span of just a few years, that feud morphed into hockey’s nastiest and most revealing feud: one that exposed the NHL’s double standards, cronyism and cultural division.

Preseason hockey is meaningless by design, a handful of superficial tune-ups that even die-hard fans barely notice as opening night approaches, when the games finally start to count. Yet over the past week, the Panthers and Lightning have turned two exhibition games into three-hour dreams of violence: 114 penalties totaling nearly 500 minutes in the box, 16 driving fouls and a player sent off for an assist on an eighth goal that shouldn’t have counted. It was total chaos before the season even started, but the uneven fallout raised uncomfortable questions around the sport.

It all started last Thursday when Florida’s AJ Greer hit Tampa’s Brandon Hagel in the head — a callback to last spring’s playoff meeting between the teams, when Hagel’s borderline hit on Panthers captain Aleksander Barkov triggered Florida defenseman Aaron Ekblad’s retaliatory headshot that left Hagel with a concussion cerebral. Greer’s low shot, punishable by a fine of just $2,000, violated hockey’s unwritten code: Never attack a player with a known history of concussion, especially one who has already been injured.

So on Saturday, Tampa fielded a team of AHL agents and spent the night demanding justice at the border. The league’s response? Heavy fines and suspensions for the Lightning, none for Florida.

These ugly scenes have revived an old suspicion: that the NHL’s disciplinary system protects its favorites. The Panthers connections only make the optics worse. The league’s director of hockey operations, Colin Campbell, is a longtime broker whose son is a minority owner and assistant general manager of — you guessed it — the Panthers. The head of player safety, George Parros, is a former Panther himself. A decade ago, Campbell’s leaked emails showed him chastising referees for not giving Florida preferential treatment. Nothing has changed.

Across the NHL, this latest bloodbath feels like business as usual: a stark reminder that hockey’s old-timers’ ring is pulling the strings of a two-tiered justice system.

Tensions have been brewing for years. For most of their existence, the Panthers were left behind, overshadowed by the more successful Lightning, who won the first of their three Stanley Cups in 2004. They then traded for Matthew Tkachuk — a brilliant, restless forward — and hired a coach who encouraged chaos. Overnight, the franchise became an almost comically seedy heel team: relentlessly boring, gleefully abrasive, and somehow good enough to win anyway. They ran past the goalies, took liberties after the whistle and seemed to revel in their role as the villains of modern hockey.

Tampa, by contrast, had built its dynasty on cool precision: a team that blended speed, skill and structure to win back-to-back Cups in 2020 and 2021. For Lightning fans, Florida’s rise represented something else: the triumph of cynicism, of hockey as provocation rather than craft.

Long-simmering tensions finally exploded at April’s postseason meeting. When Hagel flattened Barkov with what looked like a clean check — a playoff-speed hockey game gone wrong — officials ruled it illegal because Barkov hadn’t touched the puck. Hagel received a one-match suspension. The next night, Ekblad, who had already served a lengthy ban earlier in the season for performance-enhancing drugs, stalked him and fired a shot into his head, concussing him – a retaliatory hit that only lasted two games. Florida won the series and its second straight Cup, while Tampa muttered double standards.

So when Greer targeted Hagel again — in a meaningless September preseason game, no less — the Lightning saw red. Coach Jon Cooper rested his stars and called up six minor players – including two known enforcers – to build a full roster without exposing his smaller, more talented forwards. Minutes later, 32-year-old bruiser Scott Sabourin leveled Ekblad with a single punch that knocked him to his knees. From there, the evening descended into absurdity: fights after almost every whistle, fights in the penalty box, more than 300 cumulative penalty minutes and so many expulsions that both teams finished with nine skaters. At one point, Florida’s Niko Mikkola even had an assist despite being sent off just minutes earlier. It’s not every night that an ejected player somehow helps extend an 8-0 lead before anyone notices.

The next day, discipline meted out by the NHL’s Department of Player Safety fell squarely on Tampa. Six players fined, two suspended, organization assessed $100,000 and Cooper fined an additional $25,000. Greer of Florida kept his nominal $2,000 fine. The perception was clear as day: the Panthers could do nothing wrong. And that sense of impunity is what has transformed a once-trivial interstate rivalry into something much darker: a microcosm of how the NHL continues to protect its internals and punish its critics.

This challenge fits perfectly with the Panthers’ broader identity. Under the leadership of Vincent Viola – a billionaire financier and former Donald Trump nominee for Secretary of the Army – the franchise has cultivated an overtly Maga aesthetic. After their first Cup victory, the team’s executives proudly visited Trump at the White House, presenting him with a personalized “45-47” jersey. Douglas Cifu, Viola’s longtime business partner and minority owner, vice chairman and alternate governor of the Panthers, also runs Virtu Financial, the high-frequency trading firm he co-founded with Viola. In May, Cifu was suspended indefinitely by the NHL after an incendiary social media exchange with a Canadian fan in which he discussed the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and mocking Trump’s 51st state, a move that did little to distance the team from its far-right image.

Across the state, Lightning owners have taken the opposite approach: removing a statue of Robert E Lee from downtown Tampa, supporting diversity initiatives and hosting some of the most inclusive heritage nights in the league.

In miniature, the battle in Florida is now a reflection of the United States itself: grievance and aggression on one side, progressive image on the other, both engaged in a struggle over what the sport and the country should be.

The irony is that all of this happened during what is supposed to be the modern Enlightenment era of the NHL. League executives boast about player safety, mental health awareness and moving beyond the bloody spectacle of decades past. Yet its disciplinary apparatus still operates with the opaque impunity of an old boys’ club. When New York Rangers owner James Dolan semi-publicly condemned the league’s refusal to suspend Washington’s Tom Wilson in 2021, the NHL did not reconsider the call; he fined the team $250,000 for daring to question it. Commissioner Gary Bettman chastised the Rangers for “humiliating” a league executive and said such criticism was “unacceptable.” The message was quite clear: silence is rewarded, dissent is punished, and the culture that enables violence is most fiercely protected.

But this time the silence was broken. Across the league, managers and players are reportedly quietly supporting Tampa — not because they condone vigilante justice, but because they recognize the futility of appealing to a system that is against them. The Panthers may have won the Stanley Cup two years in a row, but they’ve also become the embodiment of a league that rewards arrogance and punishes responsibility.

The fact that the NHL’s biggest controversy of the year erupted before a single regular season game had been played speaks volumes. The sport that continually promises to modernize cannot help but celebrate its own anarchy: a league where power, not principle, decides who gets away with what – and who ends up bleeding on the ice.