Cote: Florida Panthers’ joy ride heads home after road mastery in East finals has Carolina reeling | 0pinion
“The Happiest Team in America” continues to lift South Florida as it deep-freezes opponents in its path.
The Florida Panthers are on the greatest stretch seen in Miami-area sports since the Heat’s Big 3 era produced four straight NBA finals and two championships from 2010 to 2014. It will take 16 playoff victories for the Cats to raise a second straight Stanley Cup, and they’re 10 wins in now with Thursday night’s 5-0 victory at Carolina in Game 2 of the NHL’s Eastern Conference finals.
Teams up 2-0 in hockey playoff history have won the series 86.1% of the time, and now the Panthers head home to the Sunrise barn for games Saturday and Monday. Florida swept Carolina in the 2023 East finals and is poised to do it again. The Hurricanes on Thursday lost a 14th consecutive conference final game, so they made need a pick axes and a miner’s helmets to dig deep enough to locate any confidence.
Carolina looks overmatched — embarrassed — in this series, outscored 10-2 in the two games, as Florida continues not just winning, but having fun on the way.
Hurricanes coach Rod Brind’Amour sounded beaten after the game. When a reporter began a question, “It started off bad, got worse...” — he jumped in with “You summed it up. Tough night. I didn’t know what I was seeing that first period. Florida was on it. You gotta give them credit.”
Florida is now on a 7-2 run in road playoff games, and by a 22-4 goals margin in the past four.
“It’s fun when you go on the road and it goes quiet,” Carter Verhaeghe said.
It was a couple weeks shy of 40 years ago when the late great Miami Hurricanes baseball coach Ron Fraser coined “The Happiest Team in America” to describe his 1985 College World Series-winning group.
For the first time since it’s time to unearth the phrase for a South Florida team.
Sports Business Journal on Wednesday named the reigning Cup-champion Panthers the national “Sports Team of the Year” for March 2024 through February 2025, an honor that encompasses accomplishment both on and off the playing field, in this case the ice. And so much of that success, both ways, is the culture of camaraderie and an emphasis on fun amid the pressure — a we-are-family vibe instilled when general manager Bill Zito and coach Paul Maurice took over what had long been a listing franchise..
The mood is light even when the task is heavy.
“Pressure is made up. It’s a lot of noise, media attention,” Brad Marchand says. “Pressure is something you embrace or something you can be nervous about. This is why you work your whole life, to be in a position to have success. That excites you to wanna be a difference-maker, to want to be a hero. That’s when the pressure just kind of slides off.”
A late-season trade from Boston left Marchand trying to fit in with a team that once hated him. That team made it easy.
“I can’t say enough about the organization or the group,” he said. “Their culture is incredible.”
This franchise treats its players right and the players respond. The roster is tailor-made with two kinds of ‘fit’ the prerequisite.
“The thing our management group does the best is find guys who can fit in the room and fit our style of play,” Maurice said Wednesday, the order there intentional.
Led by the example of captain Aleksander Barkov, there is no caste system evident, no star-system in attitude. Matthew Tkachuk and Marchand are equal teammates with the guys on the fourth line.
“That’s all Barkov,” Maurice said. “Tkachuk and Brad, too, they’re just one of the guys in the room.”
That’s how Maurice explains Florida’s 7-2 record on the road this postseason.
“You are at an emotional deficit [on the road],” he said. “You get that emotion from the bench, from the guys supporting and encouraging each other. The players are running the bench.”
Befitting that, the entire Panthers’ depth chart is producing in these playoffs, the goals coming from all over the roster, all over the ice, as steady Sergei Bobrovsky protects the Cats’ net in a masterful ‘Playoff Bob’ sequel. He has now allowed only six goals in the past six playoff games.
The Panthers led 1-0 Thursday just 77 seconds into Game 2 in a start straight out of a nightmare for Brind’Amour as Gustav Forsling put in a snap shot that turned Raleigh quiet. The setup was from Tkachuk as Forsling became the 18th different Cat and eighth different defensemen to score a goal this postseason.
“The team that loses the first game will come out with the hardest push possible,” Maurice had said.
Instead it was Florida’s fast start that had Carolina on its skate-heels.
Cats made it 2-0 mid-first on a Tkachuk tip-in from Verhaeghe — Tkachuk ending a nine-game goal drought this postseason.
Sam Bennett’s tip-in made it 3-0 later in the first on a power play, with Verhaeghe also part of the assault on Carolina’s blue half-moon. The Panthers given a man advantage is like Jeff Bezos getting a raise. The scoring sequence followed a lovely Bobrovsky save on a shorthanded odd-man rush — the Cats firing on all cylinders. It took only five shots on goal for Florida to cash those first three scores.
“It was an unreal start from us,” said Tkachuk. “The way we played in the first period was as good as it gets.”
The Verhaeghe-Bennett-Tkachuk line was fabulous Thursday.
“You saw a really veteran game out of those guys,” Maurice said.
The only negative in a sublime opening period for Florida was Sam Reinhart leaving with an apparent knee injury after enduring a questionable hip-check hit from Sebastian Aho that the league should take a look at.
Florida caught a break 51 seconds into the second period when an apparent goal by Aho was negated (kismet?) by offside after a Panthers timeout and a smart coach’s challenge by Maurice. I thought the overturn was justified yet a close and perhaps debatable call. A bit of luck flew with Maurice’s challenge.
“A pivotal moment,” said the coach.
Bennett’s second goal of the night and NHL-high ninth of the playoffs made it 4-0 in the final minute of the second period. Verhaeghe’s big night continued with a wrap-around shot/pass that Bennett stuck in.
Florida had a modest 15 shots on goal through two periods but Carolina had a meager seven.
Frustrated Hurricanes fans were chanting, “Shoot the puck!”
The third period would bring no relief, or hope, to Carolina. Tardily, flailing for a spark, they put the backup goalie in.
The most notable shot in the third was the one Marchand took to flatten Shayne Gostisbehere for the intentional puck he had aimed at Marchand in Game 1.
The other was Barkov’s redirect of an Aaron Ekblad shot that made the 5-0 final.
Maurice afterward, respecting the opponent, said, “This is so much tighter than the score tells you. This is not a flow series. It’s a grind.”
To the rest of us, it seems a rout.
“We want to get greedy,” Panthers defenseman Seth Jones had said Thursday before the puck dropped. “We want to come in here and not be just OK because we won the first one. We want to put their backs to the wall.”
Consider it done.
The Cats’ joy ride chugs on, strengthening, accelerating.
This story was originally published May 22, 2025 at 10:49 PM.
