‘We have every piece we need.’ Can the Florida Panthers still make the 2023 playoffs?
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Radko Gudas laughed incredulously.
The brutish Florida Panthers defenseman sat in the Scotiabank Arena penalty box, in awe of the “charging” penalty he’d received for getting tangled up with the Toronto Maple Leafs’ Zach Aston-Reese and bulldozing him into the Florida net. Was it charging? Even a penalty at all? Who knows. The standard set by the officials in Tuesday’s January slushfest wasn’t exactly high. In a chippy game for both sides, the Leafs received seven power plays to the Panthers’ three. At one point a storm of cross-checks to superstar Auston Matthews went uncalled, and he got whistled for retaliating. OK, sure. A William Nylander penalty shot 34 seconds into the third period? Why not. Add it to the bingo card. Panthers coach Paul Maurice couldn’t help but laugh off the entire zany affair.
“I thought we had the inordinate share of those (calls),” he said. “Hard to describe the call. Usually at least they have enough there to argue, come over and say ‘Yeah, the stick got up.’ Radko Gudas hit’s as clean a hit as you can level, stick on stick, body on body, they’re both going in the same direction, no problem with a guy going to the net at all, that’s hockey. I don’t know what the hell those guys were doing tonight, but it wasn’t Florida Panther friendly.”
Both sides came away from Tuesday’s game, which the Leafs rallied to win 5-4 in overtime, feeling jobbed by the officials. But the play was sloppy, with turnovers aplenty. Leafs goaltender Matt Murray got yanked in the second period after surrendering four goals on eight shots.
Ugly January games happen. It’s tough to predict a winner on nights when it seems like so much of the outcome is determined by random chance. And yet…it seems like the Panthers, last season’s Presidents’ Trophy winners, have been on the wrong side of games like these time and again this season. Last year, when they obliterated franchise records with 58 wins and 122 points, they held a .688 win percentage in one-goal games, good for third in the NHL. They were 15-4-1 in games where their opponents outshot them. This season, they’re .500 in one-goal games and 8-10-1 in games where their opponents outshoot them. Last season, the Panthers held the fifth-highest shooting percentage in the NHL at 11.01. This season? They sit in the 24th in the league at 9.26.
On one hand, it makes sense that this Panthers team has performed differently. Its personnel are vastly different, as captain Aleksander Barkov pointed out Tuesday.
“It’s hard right now to try and compare last year to this year,” he said. “Last year was last year. We’re fully concentrating on building something new here. A lot of new guys and new system, so we don’t really think about what happened last year.”
Two core players, left winger Jonathan Huberdeau and defenseman MacKenzie Weegar, were sacrificed in the blockbuster trade for Matthew Tkachuk. Claude Giroux, Mason Marchment and Ben Chiarot departed as UFAs. Anthony Duclair suffered an offseason Achilles injury from which he still hasn’t returned. With the understanding that the team’s cap situation was set to improve by summer 2023, it appeared on paper before this season started that the Panthers and GM Bill Zito knew they were taking a step backward to eventually go forward and win the long game. It’s debatable whether it made sense to pull the chips back with a Presidents’ Trophy winning team and replace a Jack Adams Award finalist coach in Andrew Brunette, but we could at least say the Panthers had a visible plan.
Still, the expected regression probably went further than anyone planned. The puck luck wasn’t there. Neither was the full Florida lineup, as top defenseman Aaron Ekblad, No. 1 center Aleksander Barkov and emerging young forward Anton Lundell all missed significant chunks of time with injuries, with goaltender Spencer Knight the latest to land in the infirmary. The perfect storm of bad luck stuck the Panthers with a 16-18-4 record as of Jan. 1.
But the Panthers have started to get healthy. They have most of their key players back. Despite the loss to Toronto Tuesday, Florida is 5-2-1 in its past seven games. During that stretch, the Panthers have actually been territorially outplayed, holding 48 percent of the expected goals at 5-on-5. Their luck has turned. Their shooting percentage has rebounded to north of 11 percent. They’ve won three one-goal games in that span. Ekblad expressed Tuesday that they’re showing more of a consistently competitive spirit, especially in the first periods of games.
So if they’re getting healthier and no longer snake bitten by nasty puck luck: are they about to make a run? Their mini surge has them within four points of the last Eastern Conference wildcard spot, but the Pittsburgh Penguins, the team holding it down, has two games in hand. Any notion of climbing into the Atlantic Division bracket is out the window already. The Panthers sit 12 points back of the third-place Tampa Bay Lightning, who have three games in hand. So if the Panthers have any hope of climbing back into the race, it’ll have to be through the Wildcard path.
The game count isn’t their friend right now. But 24 of their remaining 36 games are against Eastern Conference opponents, meaning they have a chance to control their own destiny if they get hot.
We don’t really know who the 2022-23 Panthers are yet. We’ve barely seen them whole. But the healthier they get, the more skill the inject back into their lineup, the more they resemble last season’s mighty outfit – except they have superstar forward Tkachuk around this time to take them on his back. Writing the Panthers off as a playoff team this season thus feels premature.
“The last two, three weeks we’ve been finding how to play as a team, how to work really hard and play smart,” Barkov said. “It’s not going to go all the time our way, but the previous six, seven games our effort has been there every game. And we’ve been winning as well.
“We have every piece we need to get success (in the playoffs). It’s a long season and you’ve got to get hot at some point. I feel like we’ve been finding our identity. It’s going to come. Just keep working hard.”
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