With the start of the 2023 Stanley Cup Playoffs set to begin tomorrow, PHR makes its first foray into playoff series analysis with our 2023 Playoff Primers. Where does each team stand in their series, and what storylines could dominate on and off the ice? We continue our look with the Atlantic Division showdown between the Boston Bruins and Florida Panthers.
With each record that they set during their 65-win, 135-point regular season, the focus began to shift for the Boston Bruins. They’ve known they’d be making the playoffs since December, if not earlier. While other teams went to battle with the focus of securing a playoff spot, the Bruins were chasing records etched into the books by some of the NHL’s most historic teams. Now? The records have been set, their regular season is over, and they’re now in the same postseason boat as everybody else: zero wins, zero losses.
For this Boston team, making a deep run is considered the bare minimum. Anything less than a berth in the conference finals will feel like a disappointment, and it’s very likely that anything less than a Stanley Cup victory will leave fans in New England wanting more.
For the Florida Panthers, it was an uneven regular season that left them in the wholly undesirable position of being Boston’s first-round opponent. There are many who will expect these Panthers to serve as the Washington Generals to Boston’s Harlem Globetrotters, but just write them off in this series would be a mistake.
One must remember that it was just a few years ago that the Tampa Bay Lightning flirted with regular-season history, only to be swept in the first round of the playoffs against a hungry Blue Jackets team that just barely scraped their way into the playoffs. This is a scrappy Panthers team looking to move past the disappointment that defined their elimination in last year’s playoffs, led by new franchise face Matthew Tkachuk.
Will the Bruins take their first step toward a place in hockey history? Will their regular-season dominance extend to the postseason in a way it couldn’t for the 2018-19 Lightning? Or will we see another historic upset, perhaps even with reigning Calder Cup Champion Alex Lyon leading Florida to glory?
Regular Season Performance
Boston: 65-12-5, 135 points, +128 goal differential
Florida: 42-32-8, 92 points, +17 goal differential
Head-To-Head
October 17th, 2022: Boston 5, Florida 3
November 23rd, 2022: Florida 5, Boston 2
December 19th, 2022: Boston 7, Florida 3
January 28th, 2023: Florida 4, Boston 3
Series tied 2-2
Team Storylines
The Bruins are one of the NHL’s deepest, most talented teams, with a lineup full of top-end talent and valuable role players. You don’t set the NHL record for regular-season success without an elite lineup, after all. But the major question for the Bruins is something relatively out of their control: health.
They have experience, with a few players remaining from the team’s 2011 Stanley Cup victory and even more from the 2019 roster that just barely missed out on a championship. They have scoring talent, led by 61-goal, 113-point scorer David Pastrnak, defensive talent, and a goalie who posted an otherworldly .938 save percentage in the regular season.
But among those top players, there are some health-related question marks. We covered reports earlier today that Bruins captain Patrice Bergeron could miss the first game of the series, and Linus Ullmark has been dealing with an undisclosed injury in recent days, though he did practice yesterday with no restrictions.
This Bruins team is one that has 2019 Hart Trophy winner Taylor Hall listed as a third-liner, alongside Tyler Bertuzzi, who has scored 16 points in 21 games in Boston. They have a stable full of versatile, capable players who can handle any situation thrown at them. The major question, then, will be if those players can stay healthy, and if they can maintain the standard of play they set in the regular season in the more intense environment of the playoffs.
There are no roster-related question marks surrounding this Bruins team, as long as they stay healthy. The main storyline to watch for this series, from their perspective, will be availability and execution, and those are two factors that are impossible to fully evaluate before the puck is dropped tomorrow.
For Florida, the main storyline relates to their situation in their crease.
With the Panthers’ season on the line, the team turned to Lyon, an AHL netminder who won the Calder Cup with the Chicago Wolves last season.
He played extremely well, rattling off a six-game winning streak that revived Florida’s fading playoff dreams.
If the Panthers want to have any hope of pulling off the impossible and becoming the second underdog to stun a record-setting, 60-plus win team in the first round, they’ll need Lyon to play as he did during the winning streak.
They’ll also need their penalty kill to step up, as the Bruins powerplay, while inconsistent, is capable of scorching hot stretches. The Panthers’ penalty kill ranked 23rd in the NHL this season, killing 76% of opposing man advantages. The Bruins killed off 87.3%, the highest rate in the NHL by a decent margin.
While goaltending will be the main focus in this series, special teams could also be the battleground where Florida either finds a way to get ahead or ends up falling apart.
Prediction
The Panthers are a quality team whose stellar play in recent weeks rightfully earned them a spot in the playoffs. With players such as Tkachuk, and Aleksander Barkov, and an experienced coach like Paul Maurice, they’re not exactly the easiest team to bet against. The pressure the Bruins will be facing as such a successful regular-season team will be immense, and to discount how impactful that pressure could be would be a mistake.
That being said, how realistic is the possibility that these Bruins, who barely ever lose consecutive games, fall to a team potentially starting a goalie with under 40 games of NHL experience? How likely is it that the possible final act of Bergeron’s illustrious NHL career ends with a humiliating upset loss to a division rival?
The Blue Jackets proved a few years ago that anything can happen in the Stanley Cup playoffs. NHL-caliber players on any team, regardless of where they are in the standings, have it in them to find a way to win any game, regardless of the challenge posed by their opposition.
In the final game of their regular season, the basement-dwelling Montreal Canadiens held their own against and nearly beat the Bruins. But in a seven-game series? That’s a far taller task, and it seems as though the Boston will have more than enough to outlast even the fiercest of challenges from the Panthers.
The prediction: Bruins win in six games.
Photos courtesy of USA Today Sports Images
There’s a reason why they play the games. The last time a team set the record for most wins in a season, they got swept.
Any news on Bennett? Panthers in 6.
Mm. How realistic is the scenario? I hate to say it, but there was a season where a Bruins team, the defending Cup champions, a team that broke over fifty NHL records en route to the greatest offensive season in league history, ran in the first round into a goalie who had played only *six* NHL games (and fewer than 40 *professional* games). The goalie’s own encomium on that series was “In games seven through thirteen of my NHL career, I did what I’d be most remembered by.”
Ken Dryden in 1971 wasn’t the first goalie who came out of nowhere to stun the Bruins, and unfortunately (Hammond, Leighton, Binnington) would not be the last. Bruins in six sounds about right to me, but this is not going to be a cakewalk.
Panthers are the only team to beat the Bruins more than once this season.
I believe both games were 2nd game of back to backs…. and the last game the Panthers tied the game with 3 seconds left and won in overtime. Anything can happen, but the Bruins will this series.
What buoys my optimism for the Bruins is getting Orlov and depth at the deadline.