180,000 people: How Canes’ victory parade compares with other Stanley Cup parades
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- The city of Raleigh estimates 180,000 attended the Hurricanes parade.
- Raleigh’s 180,000 Canes fans equals over a third of the city population.
- Fort Lauderdale’s 2025 Panthers parade drew an estimated 400,000 people, per CBS.
Raleigh now estimates 180,000 people flooded downtown for the Carolina Hurricanes Stanley Cup victory parade on Saturday.
On Saturday afternoon, following a parade and rally, Raleigh Police announced an estimated crowd of 150,000 people. That’s a record for an event in Raleigh, according to the city.
Comparatively, when the Canes won their last Stanley Cup in 2006, the downtown parade attracted 8,000 people. A larger parade at the Lenovo Center, then called the RBC Center, attracted 30,000 people, The News & Observer previously reported.
The police department did not respond to questions from The News & Observer asking how they estimated the crowd’s size.
The Downtown Raleigh Alliance is still making its own estimate of the crowd’s size, using phone signals and other measures to get a grasp on people inside buildings in downtown Raleigh as well as along the parade route, said Ileana Rodriguez, the organization’s spokesperson, in an interview Monday.
What about last year’s parade?
When the Florida Panthers won the cup in 2025, an estimated 400,000 fans attended their victory parade in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, more than double the size of Raleigh’s parade, according to CBS.
Fort Lauderdale has a population of 180,000, according to the U.S. Census — less than the number of people who attended the parade. But the Miami-Fort Lauderdale-West Palm Beach metropolitan area has more than 6 million people.
For comparison, Raleigh’s population is estimated at about 506,000, with a metropolitan area of 1.4 million people.
That means Raleigh’s parade, which stretched from Hillsborough Street down Fayetteville Street, exiting on Davie Street, drew an equivalent of more than a third of the city’s population and more than 12% of the metro’s population. However, not everyone who attended the parade was from Raleigh or the Triangle.
Previous parades
- The Panthers also won the cup in 2024, drawing more than 200,000 to their parade that year.
- The Vegas Golden Knights won in 2023, with around 200,000 attending their parade. Las Vegas has a population of almost 690,000, while its metropolitan area has almost 2.3 million, according to the census.
- More than 500,000 went to the Colorado Avalanche’s victory parade in 2022, according to Axios. Denver’s population is about 750,000 while the metro area has over 3 million people, according to the census.
- The Tampa Bay Lightning won the cup in both 2020 and 2021. Celebrations in 2021 faced COVID-19 restrictions, meaning Lightning fans held a boat parade.
This story was originally published June 22, 2026 at 5:09 PM.
