For the second straight season, the Florida Panthers eliminated the Tampa Bay Lightning in the first round of the Stanley Cup Playoffs with a 6-3 win on Wednesday night. The Panthers defeated the Lightning four games to one, and will play the winner of the Toronto/Ottawa series in the second round.
How did the Lightning lose to the Panthers? We all thought the Lightning had the better team talent-wise, top to bottom than the Panthers.
The Panthers beat the Lightning mainly because they were the better team in the series. They did the little things, minimized mistakes, and took advantage of every Lightning miscue to win the series.
But sometimes, the better team doesn’t always win in a series. The team that wants it the most and shows the most heart and passion comes out on top, and the Panthers did all that and more. Florida played better defense, turned the puck over less than the Lightning, and were able to capitalize every time the Lightning made a mistake.
Panthers goalie Sergei Bobrovsky was outstanding against the Bolts and was one of the difference-makers in this series with a 2.21 GAA. The Lightning needed Andrei Vasilevskiy to match Bobrovsky’s play, and he failed to do that with a 3.27 GAA. Vasilevskiy played well at times, but his play was not good enough to help the Bolts advance to round two.
Tampa Bay’s scorers failed to score in this series. Art Ross Trophy winner Nikita Kucherov, who had 37 goals and 121 points in the regular season, had no goals and four assists in the series. Kucherov has not scored a goal in his last 16 playoff games. Brayden Point had just two goals, and Brandon Hagel, despite missing two games, had zero goals and zero assists.
Jake Guentzal was the Lightning’s best player in the series, scoring three goals and three assists. In the playoffs, your leading scorers must step up and be better than they were in the regular season. No one outside of Guentzel stepped up in this series for the Lightning.
Florida’s power-play was better than that of the Lightning. The Panthers power play clicked at 25%, while the Lightning were just 11.1% on the power play. The Lightning finished the series 2-of-18 on the power play after being top five in the NHL during the regular season.
There has now been a changing of the guard in Florida. The Panthers can now say they are the best team in Florida and just may go on to win their second consecutive Stanley Cup.
Jon Cooper talked about that transition after being eliminated by the Panthers. “They know how to do it. And there’s only a few teams in the last little while that really know how to do it. And we were one of them, and now they’re one of them, and it’s unfortunate we’ve had to run into them.”
“Whether they swept us or was 4-1, 4-2, to me, that’s kind of irrelevant. They beat us. We’ve been the rep in the Stanley Cup Final (Lightning and Panthers) the last five years. It was our turn for a while. Now it’s theirs, and our job is to make sure it’s our turn again.”
It will be an interesting off-season in Tampa as changes have to be made. The Lightning have lost in the first round in the last three seasons since losing the Stanley Cup final in 2022. This is inexcusable, given the talent on this team.
Changes have to be made, starting with the defense. The Lightning had hoped the signing of Ryan McDonagh would improve the defense, but regular-season success does not translate to post-season success. Numerous times in this series, Florida players could stand in front of the net without much aggressiveness from the Lightning defense. The defense was better this season, but old habits re-surfaced, and the Bolts were caught out of position numerous times. They also turned the puck over at the most inopportune times, leading to many scoring chances for the Panthers.
As the curtain falls on another Lightning season, a summer of change is in order. It will be an interesting off-season in Tampa.