For the Florida Panthers hockey club, the alignment of the team, organization and community has finally become centered for success.
“All the naysayers in the beginning, it’s like, ice hockey in South Florida? Teams in the middle of the Everglades?” Panthers President and CEO Matt Caldwell told Fox News Digital.
“We tried to embrace all that and say, well, that’s the beauty of this. Like, we have such a challenging mission… so it’s amazing that we’ve recreated the image.”
Since 2016, Caldwell has stood at the helm of the young team’s ship, working to turn around the NHL’s “worst” team in the league by shaking up management, changing the ticketing structure and finding new sponsorship and branding collaborations.
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Fast-forward to today, and the Florida Panthers are on the hunt for their second-straight Stanley Cup win after clinching the finals the last three consecutive years. During these roughly three weeks of finals games, the Panthers pump more than $100 million into the local economy — a figure that is expected to multiply in 2025.
“The reach is certainly going to increase, so I can only imagine that that number is going to get higher because of the geography that’s widened,” Fort Lauderdale Downtown Development Authority President and CEO Jenni Morejon also told Fox News Digital. “So that hundred-million [dollar] impact is certainly going to grow.”
Hockey has now served as a catalyst for urban growth in the greater Fort Lauderdale area, with the Panthers investing more than $65 million into the redevelopment of their official practice rink, public ice rinks and even a concert venue.
According to local business leaders, foot traffic and revenue can bump up by 30% on any given game day or weekend.
“Every year, it becomes more and more popular, right? I think it also helps that they’ve been playing phenomenally,” Breakwater Hospitality Group founder Emi Guerra also told Fox News Digital. “The fact that they play so great, the games are exciting to watch, the ups and downs, the thriller that it is. I think that is amazing entertainment, showing the grit of what they do… it lifts the whole community up.”
Caldwell, a former U.S. Army captain and vice president at Goldman Sachs, kept two primary goals in mind when he began to lead the Panthers’ charge: get financially stable and win a championship.
“What I tried to inspire with the staff and with our hockey operations… I really wanted to have an inspirational sense of purpose. And what I talked to our staff about a lot was, let’s be the greatest turnaround in sports history,” Caldwell said. “Winning is the No. 1 ingredient in sports to financial success, ultimately.”
“We had the worst record in the league, all of our financial metrics from season tickets to sponsorship to attendance. All of our ancillary businesses were all at the bottom of the league. So it’s a daunting task,” he added. “It was a team that was really struggling financially, it was losing a lot of money. And my more kind of short, medium-term goal was to just get it financially stable.”
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“I definitely was fighting every day to try to make sure that we get people in the building and get people to respect our brand, get our cash flow loss in a stable place. And slowly but surely, we just kept chipping away and started making progress. And then, obviously, these last five years, with all the consistent team play… everything’s come together,” Caldwell expanded.
Forbes most recently ranked the Panthers 26th in terms of NHL team valuations at $1.35 billion. At the top are the Toronto Maple Leafs, worth nearly $4 billion. But the monetary figure isn’t something Caldwell is too concerned about.
“The sports industry, they’re not publicly traded. So it’s not like you’re watching a stock price. They don’t necessarily follow typical discounted cash flow or certain financial modeling, valuation methods,” the Cats’ CEO said.
“There’s a supply and demand for these sports teams… It’s kind of like a barometer that you can look at just to make sure that the money you’re putting into the team, the valuation’s outpacing that,” Caldwell said. “Our tickets, our sponsorships, our media rights, all of our marketing metrics on social media, all of our casual fans, our TV viewership… All those things grow our revenue, grow our exposure.”
From giving away free home-game tickets “on the street” about a decade ago, to currently ranking fifth for NHL attendance and paid tickets, the momentum has created a “tremendous domino effect” on the region’s macroeconomy in which the Panthers actively collaborate.
“They put not only their money, but their energy and their personalities into this community with programs that are matching up students and young skaters, causes for the veterans,” Morejon detailed. “It’s not just about bringing a team here and selling tickets. It’s really about leaving a mark.”
“It does help everyone: staff, neighboring businesses, all the supporting businesses, everything from suppliers and the guy driving the truck to deliver the vegetables and the fruit and the booze, all the way down to the person serving the drink,” Guerra noted. “So I think everyone’s very appreciative and they definitely feel it when they’re winning. It’s phenomenal because that’s what they do. That’s what their craft is, but when they win, there’s more implications than just winning for the team. They win for an entire community and everyone feels it.”
“We went backwards before we went forwards… we just knew that we had to kind of rip it down and start all over,” Caldwell reflected.
“I hope we bring another Stanley Cup home here over the next couple of weeks. I hope we bring more over the coming years, but we want to be bigger than that,” the CEO added. “We want to be role models. When a local county or city needs something, they know they can call the Panthers. In a [time] of crisis, they know they can reach out to us and we’ll be there. They know that we’re always going to do the right thing.”
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