Rockstar Shit: Aleksander Barkov Showed Up To His Neighbor's House At 4am To Let Them See The Stanley Cup
Carmen Mandato. Getty Images.Aleksander Barkov will forever be the first Florida Panther to hoist the Stanley Cup over their head. He led the Panthers to their first Cup win in the franchise's 30-year history, and now a kid from Tampere, Finland will always be a legend in South Florida.
It's been a long journey for Barkov to get the Panthers here. He was drafted 2nd overall in 2013, right behind Nathan MacKinnon. He immediately made the jump to the NHL at 18-years-old, so he just wrapped up his 11th year in the NHL. He's the longest tenured Florida Panther ever, currently holding the Panthers' most games played record with 737. Individually he's been great in all of those years, but the years weren't always great to the Panthers. He went his first 8 seasons in the league without winning a playoff series. They didn't even make the playoffs in 5 of those years, and 6 if you don't want to count their loss in the qualifying round of the 2020 bubble.
All of that is to say he's been in Florida for a long ass time. Apparently he's been in the same spot the whole time, too, but his neighbor picked an awful time to move.
Imagine you're dead asleep in the middle of the night at 4am and you start hearing some belligerently drunk lunatic banging at your door. From the sounds of the knocks, you can tell he's clearly spent the last 12 hours getting obliterated at the Elbo Room. You go down to tell that asshole to fuck off, but right as you open the door you see Lord Stanley's Cup. That's not just any belligerently drunk asshole, that's the belligerently drunk captain of the Florida Panthers.
You may not have planned on drinking before the sun came up on a weekday, but when you're in the presence of the Cup? You gotta load that puppy up and get after it. What a way to start the day.
Now you have to wonder how much FOMO the guy who moved out of that house is having right now. Poor guy went on the house hunt at the absolute worst time. Not only are the mortgage rates sky high right now, but he missed out on this insane Panthers Cup run. Missed out on having the Stanley Cup in his own kitchen. That's gotta sting a little, but it also has to be great to be able to tell everyone from now on that the captain of the Florida Panthers knocked up to see if you wanted to party right after winning the Cup. That's the people's captain right there.