The secret weapon to the Florida Panthers’ run to the 2023 Stanley Cup Final? Humor.

It's the eve of the 2023 Stanley Cup Final and Nick Cousins’ shoelaces have gone missing.

The forward came off the ice after practice Friday at T-Mobile Arena, changed out of his uniform, went to put on his shoes and realized he had a problem. Some Florida Panther beat him to his stall in the visitors’ locker room, yanked the laces right out of his sneakers and replaced them with a pair meant for ice skates.

"As you see right now," Cousins said Friday, pulling up his right pant leg to reveal the damage, "somebody stole my laces. ... The guys are getting a little bored with 10 days off."

It's nothing out of the ordinary for these Panthers, even if the great shoelace robbery is a new wrinkle. This is a team of pranksters, roastmasters and wannabe comics, led by a coach who sometimes turns his press conferences into improv comedy sessions, and it has turned out to be exactly what Florida needed to get to the Stanley Cup Final for the first time since 1996.

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The season could have gone awry at so many points — after Christmas, when the Panthers were nine points out of a postseason spot, and even maybe now after Florida dropped Game 1 of the Cup Final to the Vegas Golden Knights on Saturday to turn the pressure on for Game 2 on Monday at T-Mobile Arena — and yet it never did, in part because the Panthers’ locker room never broke apart.

"Paulie [Maurice] all year has been talking about the ... five keys of community and one of them is humor," left wing Ryan Lomberg said Wednesday. "As serious as it is and as intense as it is, you need to be able to sit back and laugh, and kind of be a little bit lighter. And take a step away and just have fun. We’re getting paid to play a game that we all love and enjoy doing, so what's the point of being so intense of all time?"

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It's part of why superstar right wing Matthew Tkachuk was never frustrated by Florida's regular-season struggles throughout his first year in Sunrise. It helped the Panthers quickly integrate Alex Lyon into the group when the third-string goaltender unexpectedly had to become a major contributor in the final month of the season. It maybe even helped them win their four-overtime marathon with the Hurricanes in Game 1 of the Eastern Conference finals last month in Raleigh, North Carolina.

It's no coincidence Maurice responded to Florida's only second-round loss to the Maple Leafs in May by cracking jokes after the game and even referencing "Semi-Pro" and also no coincidence he was in the same sort of joking mood last week after the Panthers opened the Final with a loss to the Golden Knights in Las Vegas.

"The 3-2 goal made it tough," he said Saturday, explaining when he thought the game turned on Florida. "We only had two, and they had three."

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Even after losing their biggest game of the season so far, the Panthers kept it light.

Maurice has been around long enough to know every team needs a different touch and this collection of characters is naturally a comedic bunch. Cousins, Lomberg, right wing Anthony Duclair, and defensemen Radko Gudas and Brandon Montour all come up when players list off their funniest teammates.

The introduction of Cousins into the mix as an offseason addition was vital.

"Cuz can take a chirp like I’ve never seen before and that's also important," Lomberg said. "You get guys who are a little too sensitive and then you kind of shy away from them, but he's a guy that I’ve never seen anything like it, truly. ... It just lets everybody be a little bit lighter because they know he can take it just as good as anybody."

Throughout this season, Cousins has piled up somewhere between 12-25 new nicknames, he estimated.

One has really stuck: "Chez," pronounced exactly the way it looks, rather than like the French word for home.

On bored bus rides to hotels and arenas, Montour often scours the internet to find old videos of players from their younger days — maybe something from the day they were drafted or something silly they did in their youth — and, early in the season, he struck gold.

Cousins, when he was playing for the Canadiens, filmed an "MTV Cribs"-style video to show off his home in Quebec. As Montreal is a French-speaking city, the Canadiens dubbed the video, "CHez Nick."

"I think it's pronounced actually, ‘Chez Nick,’" Montour said last week, using the proper French pronunciation. "I just kind of rolled with ‘Chez Nick’ and then it went to ‘Chez.’"

After Cousins scored his series-winning overtime goal in Toronto in Round 2, "Chez" became "Wayne Chezky" — a reference to Hockey Hall of Fame center Wayne Gretzky.

Maurice, Montour said, came up with it.

"He's feeling himself pretty good," Montour said.

For Lyon, "The Lion King" references are nothing new. People have used his "Lyon King" nickname intermittently all the way back to his days in juniors.

Still, the way Florida leaned into the nickname so hard when Lyon took over for star goaltender Sergei Bobrovsky near the end of the regular season — Lomberg always played either "I Just Can't Wait to Be King" or "Circle of Life" after wins — helped make a minor-league call-up comfortable at the most important part of the year.

"I think I speak for all AHLers in this situation, but it's just very, very difficult to maintain you’re game when you’re not quite as comfortable in your surrounding areas," Lyon said Friday. "They embraced it. Whether it's the ‘Lyon King’ thing or you get a new nickname, everything like that means something."

Multiple Panthers said they considered the funniest moment of the season to be the quadruple-overtime game in the East finals — specific moments, but also the absurdity of the entire thing and their ability to laugh at how preposterous it was.

The 2023 Stanley Cup playoffs have also seen the introduction of a victory bone, which came from a team dinner on a road trip, where a trainer promised to eat a gigantic steak by himself and everyone was howling as he struggled to finish.

He got it all down, though, and Florida kept the bone, now handing out to a key player after every postseason victory.

"We kind of have some of the personalities in this room where even at the most intense moments you can just kind of make a little joke about somebody or something," Lomberg said, "and just get all the guys laughing."