Florida has been getting away from its hard-checking, defense-first mentality, and Paul Maurice is not happy about it

The Florida Panthers have shown they can play to a certain identity, and do it quite well. 

It’s a hard-checking, maximum effort, defense-first way of playing hockey that Florida played to perfection late last season, leading to a playoff run that went all the way to the Stanley Cup Final.

For the most part, the 2023-24 Panthers have picked up where they left off last season.

That’s a big part of how Florida has been able to maneuver extended injuries to key players and still hold a 18-12-2 record through the first 32 games of the year.

Things have been far from perfect with the Panthers, though, as evidenced in several of the team’s recent losses, including Thursday’s 4-1 defeat at the hands of the mediocre St. Louis Blues.

Yeah, Florida is getting more shots, more chances, and possible even more high danger opportunities, but where it counts – on the scoreboard – they’re not getting the results.

Falling back on old habits

It took nearly an entire season for Panthers Head Coach Paul Maurice to drill into his players that they didn’t necessarily need to hold on to the puck at all times to be successful.

A lot of work goes into giving away the puck with the intention of getting it back while simultaneously taking out a player or two on the opposition and getting into a better position to score.

Playing a simple rush game, where each team goes back and forth up and down the ice, takes a lot less effort and energy.

But that isn’t what Maurice is asking of his team. He wants to see them controlling more of the play and keep their opponent bogged down in their own end.

Florida, which has been dealing with a busy schedule that has included a lot of road games, may be taking its collective foot off the gas and falling into some old habits. 

A direct result of that would be Thursday's loss to St. Louis. 

“So that's a really good example of why you can’t play a rush game, because you don't have to give up a lot of chances..we gave up five probably in the second period, they scored on three of them,” Maurice said Thursday. “But I'm not looking at Sergei Bobrovsky on any of them. They were all turnovers at the line, because we want to play the rush game going that way, and then you just give the other team…so you can give up chances close to the net like they did. Yeah, we had a bunch of chances, but that's got nothing to do with what happened in the game. And it started to creep in around the Pittsburgh game. We're trying to do so much off the rush now, you put yourself in that position. So did they have a lot of chances? No, but the ones that had were so big that it's not equal, but number doesn't matter. The quality is different, and we gave up a bunch of them.”

Need to stick with systems

It’s not lost on the Panthers players that they’re slipping out of something that works.

There is clear evidence that what Maurice is asking his players to do can have amazing results (see: Florida Panthers 2023 Stanley Cup Playoffs).

It is worth mentioning that finding motivation and drive during the postseason has no comparison to trying to do it night in and night out over an 82-game schedule.

Still, nobody is using that as an excuse to Florida's recent lull. 

“When you're in situations like this, it’s important to just stay together, not get frustrated with each other or with the game,” said Panthers defenseman Aaron Ekblad. “Our team game is a defense-first game, and that's something that we just have to stick with, and that'll guide our way out of this.”

Maurice not happy

It was pretty clear watching Maurice during the game, and afterwards while speaking with the media, that he was not pleased with how his team performed.

There were plenty of examples to take from the loss to St. Louis that he can turn into what he hopes are learning experiences for his team.

As for dissecting the video footage, Maurice knows the normally extensive process won’t take nearly as long.

“It's done,” he said of reviewing the game tape. “Like it's obvious, right? This is going to be the fastest kind of game, it’ll take you instead of three and a half to four hours, it's going to take one hour, right? You'll just rip through it and find the (plays), because they're just obvious.

“It's going to be a video (session) and it's going to be a conversation. Yeah, I understand that we're behind it a little bit. We're not feeling particularly fresh right now, and that's fine. We just have to deal with it. We'll just deal with it. We're going to look at it. We're going to talk about it. Language won’t all be clean because that's not the way we play. And they know that. This is almost an inevitable direction your team takes at some point. Our record was pretty good after the Pittsburgh game, we're feeling pretty good after the Columbus game, but we're still not scoring a lot of goals, so it doesn't feel right. So now we're losing our F3, but that's okay, because we're still scoring, right? And now we're not.”

LATEST STORIES FROM THE HOCKEY NEWS - FLORIDA

Failure to finish haunts Panthers in 4-1 loss to St. Louis

THN Archive: Ek-citement in Florida

Panthers to host first practice at new War Memorial facility on Friday

Holiday homestead beings with Panthers welcoming St. Louis to Sunrise

Practice notebook: Pair of Panthers forwards remain under the weather