The 2021 Stanley Cup Finals was the championship series of the National Hockey League’s (NHL) 2020–21 season and the culmination of the 2021 Stanley Cup playoffs. The series was between the Montreal Canadiens and the defending champion Tampa Bay Lightning. The Lightning won the best-of-seven series, four games to one, for their second consecutive and the third overall championship in franchise history. Tampa Bay had home-ice advantage in the series with the better regular season record.
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic that both shortened and delayed the start of the regular season, the series began on June 28, 2021, and concluded on July 7, 2021, marking the first time that games in the Stanley Cup Finals were held in July. The cross-border travel restrictions under the pandemic also forced the league to temporarily realign this season into four divisions with no conferences, putting all seven Canadian teams into one of those divisions. Consequently, a divisional-based postseason format was held, featuring intra-divisional matchups in the first two rounds. The four divisional playoff champions were then re-seeded by regular season points in the Stanley Cup Semifinals, with the winners of the Semifinals advancing to the Stanley Cup Finals. Under a normal playoff format, this finals matchup would be impossible, as both the Lightning and Canadiens compete in the NHL’s Eastern Conference. However, under the temporarily realigned divisions, some had mixed conferences, which enabled this scenario.
This was the first Finals since 2009 to be played entirely in the Eastern Time Zone, the first since 2011 to feature a Canadian-based team, the first since 2015 to end in a team winning the Stanley Cup at home, and the first since 2018 to require less than six games.
This Finals matchup broke the Stanley Cup Finals record for highest combined seed between teams, with twenty-six (Tampa Bay eighth, and Montreal eighteenth). This record was previously held by the 1991 Stanley Cup Finals, which had a combined seed of twenty-three.
This was Tampa Bay’s second consecutive Finals appearance and fourth overall, having won the previous year’s Finals against the Dallas Stars in six games.
Tampa Bay made very few transactions to gain players in the offseason. They traded away Braydon Coburn and Cedric Paquette and let Zach Bogosian, Kevin Shattenkirk and Carter Verhaeghe walk via free agency. They re-signed Anthony Cirelli, Patrick Maroon, Luke Schenn, and Mikhail Sergachev. During the season, Tampa Bay traded for defenceman David Savard and traded away forward Alexander Volkov. Forward Nikita Kucherov, who had hip surgery prior to the regular season, returned for the playoffs.
Tampa Bay finished with a 36–17–3 record to finish third in the Central Division. In the playoffs, the Lightning defeated their intrastate rival, the Florida Panthers, in six games in the first round. The Lightning then triumphed over the Carolina Hurricanes in five games and in the Stanley Cup Semifinals, in a rematch of the previous year’s Eastern Conference Final, they defeated the New York Islanders in seven games.
The Stanley Cup was presented to Lightning captain Steven Stamkos by NHL commissioner Gary Bettman following the Lightning’s 1–0 win in Game 5.
The following Lightning players and staff qualified to have their names engraved on the Stanley Cup:
2020–21 Tampa Bay Lightning
Players
Centres
9 Tyler Johnson
20 Blake Coleman^
21 Brayden Point
37 Yanni Gourde
71 Anthony Cirelli^
79 Ross Colton
91 Steven Stamkos^ (C)
Wingers
7 Mathieu Joseph
14 Pat Maroon
17 Alex Killorn (A)
18 Ondrej Palat
19 Barclay Goodrow^
86 Nikita Kucherov
Defencemen
2 Luke Schenn
27 Ryan McDonagh (A)
44 Jan Rutta
52 Cal Foote
58 David Savard
77 Victor Hedman (A)
81 Erik Cernak
98 Mikhail Sergachev
Goaltenders
35 Curtis McElhinney
88 Andrei Vasilevskiy
^ – played both wing and centre.
Coaching and administrative staff
Jeffrey Vinik (Chairman/Owner/Governor), Penny Vinik (Co-Owner), Steve Griggs (Chief Executive Officer/Alt. Governor), Julien BriseBois (Vice President/General Manager/Alt. Governor),
Allen Murray (Asst General Manager-Director of Amateur Scouting), Jamie Pushor (Asst. General Manager-Director of Player Personnel), Stacy Roest (Asst. General Manager-Director of Player Development), Mathieu Darche (Director of Hockey Operations),
Jon Cooper (Head Coach), Jeff Halpern (Asst. Coach), Derek Lalonde (Asst. Coach), Rob Zettler (Asst. Coach),
Frantz Jean (Goaltending Coach), Brian Garlock (Video Coordinator), Nigel Kirwan (Video Coach), Ryan Hamilton (Mental Performance Coach)
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