‘Pure joy’ and ‘hard fight’: The Panthers stunned NHL—again—and learned to be a contender

Almost 15 minutes had passed since the end of the Florida Panthers’ 3-2, overtime win against the Toronto Maple Leafs on Friday, and finally Matthew Tkachuk, the last player off the ice at Scotiabank Arena, strode into the visiting locker room. The Panthers’ latest celebration could finally begin.

Anthony Duclair held up the victory puck and presented it to “Wayne Chezsky,” better known as Nick Cousins, for his overtime series-winning goal. Tkachuk went over to hug Sergei Bobrovsky and Aleksander Barkov, and seemingly just about every staff member involved with the team. A group from Florida’s management team waited in the hallway outside the visitors’ locker room to give Bobrovsky a round of applause when the star goaltender finally emerged after his 50-save gem.

All the while, Paul Maurice watched, giddy.

“You walk into the room, it’s pure joy in there,” the coach said Friday. “They’re fun. It’s fun to come to the rink. Even when we were losing, they’re still fun guys.”

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The joy comes from the accomplishment, but also the journey.

As Tkachuk said Friday, “Nobody in the world thought we were going to be in this position right now.” The Panthers were nine points out of a postseason spot after Christmas, didn’t clinch their spot in the 2023 Stanley Cup playoffs until the last week of the regular season and made it in by just one point, lost 3 of 4 to start their first-round series with the Presidents’ Trophy-winning Bruins and have now improbably roared to life in the last three weeks to make the Eastern Conference finals by winning 7 of 8.

It’s Florida’s first trip to the NHL Conference Finals since the Panthers made it all the way to the 1996 Stanley Cup Finals in only their third season of existence and it’s context everyone around the organization carries with them at least a little bit. It’s easier, though, to for them to understand what this means in the context of this individual season, and particularly the players who have toiled away in South Florida for years and years, waiting to be part of a run like this one.

All-Star center Aleksander Barkov has been a Panther since 2013 and star defenseman Aaron Ekblad since 2014, and neither even won a playoff series until last year, let alone gotten a chance to play for a spot in the Stanley Cup Finals. Bobrovsky fought through almost four full seasons of inconsistent play in Florida — and harsh criticism of his seven-year, $70 million contract — before he finally got to be the biggest reason the Panthers pulled off a second-round upset of the Maple Leafs in five games. Even newer fixtures, like general manager Bill Zito and Maurice, fell under scrutiny because of just how poorly the regular season went a year after Florida won the Presidents’ Trophy.

The Panthers did not downplay this accomplishment, just like they didn’t downplay the significance of their first-round upset of Boston last week.

“It’s an unreal feeling,” Barkov said Friday. “To go to the Eastern Conference finals is a big deal for us and that’s all I can think right now.”

There was one big difference between this victory and their triumph in Round 1.

After the last two weeks, Florida almost came to expect this.

If the Panthers could beat the Bruins, they could beat anyone. They were underdogs, but that was all based on the regular season and an assumption Florida, which had the fewest regular-season points of any playoff team, couldn’t possibly maintain their high level of play from the first round.

They quickly bucked those expectations. They stole Games 1 and 2 in Canada, won Game 3 at home to take a commanding series lead, lost a toss-up in Game 4 and then came back to Toronto to finish off their 4-1 series victory. It all took 11 days and the Panthers were celebrating another stunner less than two weeks after they won Game 7 in Boston to complete perhaps the biggest upset in NHL history.

The scenes were strikingly similar: Florida won in overtime on the road and the crowd, which just days earlier was anticipating something like a coronation, was shell-shocked with the suddenness of the ending.

“We deserve to enjoy this one tonight. It was a grind of a series, even though it was only five games,” Tkachuk said. “A lot of people weren’t expecting a lot from us, including a bunch of Leaf fans before this series.”

The superstar right wing smiled. He saw the viral videos of Maple Leafs fans, when the Panthers were creeping toward their upset of the Bruins last month, chanting, “We want Florida!”

“I don’t think they want Florida that much anymore,” he said. “I wasn’t hearing many of those after that game.”

At this point, anyone would be foolish to. The Panthers are much closer to the team they were last year than they were in the regular season, but really they’re a blend of those two in the best ways possible because they stuck with their new identity through a trying regular season, trusting it would pay off now.

They have the talent — with players like Ekblad, Barkov, Tkachuk, Bobrovsky and star defenseman Brandon Montour — to hang with anyone, and also the structure and attitude to win tighter games in the Cup playoffs.

It’s no coincidence Florida beat Toronto with defense, holding the high-powered Maple Leafs to two goals in every game. It was the focus from Day 1 of training camp to get tighter defensively and be content to win low-scoring games, even if it meant an occasional loss when some bounce went the wrong way.

“All year, we talked about that, how to play in these types of games. You don’t open up,” Barkov said. “It’s kind of paying off.”

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When these playoffs began, the Panthers of course wanted to win the Stanley Cup, but it wasn’t even quite the primary objective, Maurice admitted.

All the changes they made in the last year — hiring Maurice, trading two stars and a first-round pick for Tkachuk, overhauling their entire style of play — were made with a multi-year timeline in mind. Simply getting to the playoffs was important.

“You either win the Stanley Cup or you don’t. We’ve got a bunch of things that we’ve got to learn to become a hard enough team to at some point win and we learned a bunch of them,” Maurice said. “It’s more important that we learn. We want to win the Stanley Cup, but from where we were coming from we were going to learn almost everything we needed to learn about winning in the Boston series.”

It has primed them to be successful for years to come and also next week, when they’ll face the Hurricanes — another Cup contender — in Round 3.

Carolina finished the regular season with the second most points in the NHL. It’ll be another challenge for Florida. The last month has gotten the Panthers ready for it.

“We are real comfortable in kind of a hard fight,” Maurice said. “We’ll take a bunch of punches in this Carolina series, for sure. We’re pretty good at getting off the mat.”