Florida and Boston split their four-game regular season series
The narratives and storylines are pretty standard heading into the first-round playoff series between the Florida Panthers and Boston Bruins.
The big bad Bruins against the eighth-seed Panthers.
A clear favorite up against a heavy underdog.
One team won Presidents’ Trophy while the other hosted the All-Star Game.
David vs. Goliath.
Globo Gym against Average Joes.
“There’s no weaknesses there,” Panthers Head Coach Paul Maurice said of the Bruins. “The strength of their team is the strength of it through their lineup and through their quality of play. We have to be absolutely at our best to beat them.”
Boston was scary good this year. Their defeats came so few and far between that the Bruins actually set new NHL records for wins and points in a season.
Over the course of their 82-game schedule, Boston was only handed 14 regulation or overtime losses.
In fact, there was only one team in the entire league that was able to beat Boston multiple times over the course of a sixty-plus-minute game.
That’s right, it was the Panthers.
“Absolutely love it,” Florida winger Anthony Duclair said of the challenge Boston presents. “I think everybody in this in this locker room is confident. We love the challenge. Coming in as huge underdogs, there’s no pressure on us. I think that's great for us. We're in a great spot and we really believe in our team and what we can accomplish.”
The Panthers enter the postseason playing some of their best hockey of the year.
Their 12-5-2 run over the final few weeks of the season is what got the Cats over the hump and into the playoffs.
Of course, just qualifying for the tournament is far from the goal.
“We’re not just happy getting in the playoffs,” said Panthers All-Star winger Matthew Tkachuk. “We believe we have a good enough team that, you never know what can happen in these situations.”
Historically speaking, it’s not unheard of for a team that had to get hot late in the season just to get into the playoffs actually doing some damage once in there.
Tkachuk explained that he knows from his time in Calgary what it’s like to enter a playoff series as a higher seed playing against a team that was firing on all cylinders entering the postseason.
“It’s not as easy as it seems,” he said. “We’ve got the greatest team in regular season history, so it’s going to be a challenge for sure, but something that we’re really, really looking forward to.”
Tkachuk is far from the only Panthers player chomping at the bit to get the series started.
That Christmas Eve feeling of excitement and anticipation has been reverberating through Florida’s locker room for the past several days.
“Hell yeah, we’re excited,” said Panthers winger Ryan Lomberg. “Obviously, they’re a good team. We’ve got to take a couple of days to prepare, but I think we’re up for the challenge. We’re looking forward to it.”
Being that Florida was a team that had some success against the juggernaut Bruins this season, it begs the question of whether the Cats can continue that trend during the playoffs.
Perhaps there is something that the Panthers coaching staff knows about Boston, a strategy or gameplan, that could breed some success.
Maurice said there is, in fact, a path Florida can follow that could lead them to taking down the Bruins.
Just don’t expect him to reveal it ahead of time.
“I know the places we have to be exceptionally strong at to give ourselves a chance,” Maurice said, quickly adding, “I’m not sharing those with you.
“This is about the places in their game that we have to be right on every time to give ourselves a chance.”
For what it’s worth, the last team to touch the NHL record for wins in a season was the 2019 Tampa Bay Lightning.
They tied the previous record set by the 95-96 Detroit Red Wings, which was 62.
Tampa entered their first-round playoff series against the Columbus Blue Jackets as huge favorites, and rightly so.
The Lightning were then eliminated by Columbus, and current Panthers goalie Sergei Bobrovsky, in a four-game sweep.
Improbable? Sure.
Impossible?
“We have a chance to do something very, very special,” said Tkachuk. “It's going to take a lot of preparation, a lot of execution.”
Added Maurice: “They’re good, and they’ve had a heck of a year. It’ll be fun.”