How much of a role do fans play in a team’s success?

When the Florida Panthers entered the 2025 playoff series, no one was really sure how the fans were going to swing. At the time, Aaron Ekblad had yet to come out of a 20-game suspension following a failed banned substances test (something that fans were certainly not happy about) and recent acquisition Brad Marchand hadn’t yet found his stride. To top all that off, Florida’s wonder boy from both the 2023 final appearance and the 2024 win, Matthew Tkachuk, hadn’t come back to his best form following an injury earlier in the year, but surprisingly, through the ups and downs, the fans remained…calm.

In the series against the Toronto Maple Leafs, Florida didn’t particularly start well. The Panthers lost the first two road games against the Leafs but ended up coming back with a win in game 3 that took place at the Amerant Bank Arena. They did it again with games 4 and 5; it was just game 6 that the Leafs managed to fight back with, holding onto their last hope of success in the series. However, when Game 7 came along, Florida managed to win on the Leafs’ turf, and how! With a 6-1 scoreboard, it is!

Though no team’s success or failure can be directly correlated to their fan culture, it’s no secret that road games aren’t as easy to play as home games, with the crowd actively cheering every time you lose a point. But somehow, the Florida Panthers have seemed relatively un-phased through it all, emerging from this playoff series as the “ultimate road warriors,” an apt term coined by the reporter who asked coach Paul Maurice what the team’s secret was.

When pressed on whether the Panthers’ string of lopsided road victories represented a true competitive edge—what most teams would call a “road advantage”—Coach Paul Maurice was quick to push back on the notion. He reframed their success not as a byproduct of venue or crowd noise but as a testament to the group’s self-sustaining energy: “I don’t feel we… necessarily feel any different at home than we do on the road. You get no… positive feedback on the road, so it all has to come from the bench.”

Maurice then drove the point home by detailing how every big play becomes its own momentum injector: “Big block, good battle, good hit, great goal—whatever it is, they’re constantly kind of reinforcing a positive that you’re not getting from anywhere else on the road. It can get quiet on that bench at times if you let it, so I think that emotional energy comes from the players to the players, so you can feel better about your road game.” It makes sense for the players to build this sort of rapport and not be reliant on fans so that their performance can be consistent throughout all games, road and home alike. Still, does this mean the fans have no influence at all?

Well, according to some of the Florida Panthers’ players, the Maple Leafs could have performed better had their fans not been breathing down their necks!

Florida Panthers’ Matthew Tkachuck disagrees with Paul Maurice attributing playoff performance to fans

In slight contrast to Paul Maurice’s take, Matthew Tkachuk recently stood up for the Maple Leafs following the aggressive fan reactions they faced towards the end of their playoff series and especially in game 7, where many Leafs fans walked out of the Scotiabank Arena, some even throwing their sweaters onto the ice.

“Sometimes you feel bad for [the Maple Leafs] because they have some unbelievable players and a great team.” Tkachuk said, “I was actually saying this last night to some of the guys: if their team was not in Toronto dealing with all the crazy circus stuff outside of it, they’d be an unbelievable team and such a hard team to play. They just have so much to deal with and I feel bad. We don’t have to deal with that in Florida. I feel like that’s what makes me and my team so lucky.” Though Tkachuk’s statements aren’t a direct counter to Maurice’s, he does seem to think that the fans play some sort of role in it all.

And Tkachuk wasn’t the only Panther to stand up for the Leafs against their own fans; Brad Marchand also chimed into the conversation, saying postgame about the Leafs, “They’re getting crucified, and I don’t think it’s justified.” Things got so bad with the Maple Leafs fans that even disbeliever in the power of fan-age, Paul Maurice commented on the situation, saying, “The scrutiny these men are under is why everybody gets paid so much. It’s a driver.” 

Sounds like someone is making a bunch of contradictory statements, or maybe it’s just the Leafs fans that are the exception to the rule; when you’re that brutal, of course you have an effect on the game. Florida doesn’t really have to deal with that, so of course they can rely just on the bench for support.