The Panthers aren’t celebrating their latest crazy comeback. ‘This isn’t a good sign’
Claude Giroux heard the tall tales of the Florida Panthers’ comebacks this year — and sometimes watched them on TV and even was on the losing end of a couple in the first half of the season, too — and yet nothing could have quite prepared him for the last week.
In the span of four days, the Panthers twice rallied from four goals down to win in overtime — they’re only the third team in NHL history to pull off two such comebacks in the same season and no one had ever done it so close together — to build their lead atop the Atlantic Division and Eastern Conference. With the best offense in more than a quarter of a century and the league’s best goal differential, Florida is a no-doubt Stanley Cup contender.
Still, Giroux is a relative outsider and, at 34 with a run to the 2010 Stanley Cup Finals on his resume, maybe the player best equipped to evaluate the current state of the Panthers and he gave a frank assessment after Florida’s astonishing 7-6, overtime win against the Toronto Maple Leafs on Tuesday in Sunrise.
“We definitely don’t make it easy on ourselves. We have a hard time playing 60 minutes,” the All-Star forward said Tuesday, and then pointed out the obvious flip side. “When we’re on, we can do a lot of damage.”
It’s the current quandary the Panthers (49-15-6) are facing. Their 24 come-from-behind wins — including an NHL-record 10 when trailing by at least three — have energized South Florida and made them one of the most compelling teams in the league, and, of course, kept them atop the conference standings.
At the same time, the Panthers’ record-setting offensive ability has masked serious defensive deficiencies, inconsistent goaltending and too-frequent carelessness from a team without any sort of track record of postseason accomplishments.
Florida hasn’t won a playoff series since its run to the 1996 Stanley Cup Finals, and there’s a good chance the first-round opponent will either be the Sidney Crosby-led Pittsburgh Penguins or Alex Ovechkin-led Washington Capitals. Even though those teams have been up and down this season, both have won Stanley Cups in the last decade and aren’t teams the Panthers can afford to dig big holes against.
“It’s entertaining,” Andrew Brunette said Tuesday, “but it’s not going to win you a lot of games.”
The interim coach has spent most of the year trying to harp on this message. Florida leads the league in virtually every important 5-on-5 offensive statistic — shots on goal, shot attempts, scoring chances, high-danger chances and expected goals per 60 minutes — yet it often digs these holes because it has also given up the 10th-most high-danger chances per 60 minutes.
For a lot of the season, Sergei Bobrovsky was able to bail out his leaky defense by ranking near the top of the league in save percentage against high-danger chances, but the star goaltender’s numbers have normalized lately and Brunette benched him in the middle of both of Florida’s four-goal comebacks. His two worst performances of 2022 have further exposed some of the Panthers’ longstanding flaws and Brunette doesn’t want to let the wins mask them.
“It’s a little worrisome as much as impressive. Obviously, we know we can score goals, but it’s just some of the things we’re doing to fall behind,” Brunette said. “We were OK to start and then we got a little bit lackadaisical with the puck.
“We have to stop doing this because it isn’t a good sign.”
How can Florida fix it? It’s easier said than done, especially given it has consistently been the Panthers’ most glaring weakness.
So far this season, Florida is generating 55.7 percent of all shot attempts in a given game, 54.9 percent of the shots on goal and 56.1 percent of the scoring chances — all three numbers rank in the top four in the league and accurately paint the picture of a team that controls possession time better than anyone else.
At the same time, the Panthers are only generating 54.1 percent of all high-danger chances in a given game, which ranks eighth in the league — still very good, but not quite at the standards Florida has set elsewhere, and the team’s high-danger save percentage is down to 12th in the league at .818.
Florida has one very clear area to clean up in the final 12 games of the regular season.
“We’re just giving up too many chances,” All-Star left wing Jonathan Huberdeau said Tuesday. “We give them them. The way we’ve been playing, we kind of do some mistakes and they take advantage of that, so I think we’ve just got to play smarter, make better decisions in our zone and not give them greater chances.”
