In biggest moment of season, Panthers play ‘a complete game’ to reignite playoff hopes

It was the morning of the biggest game of their season and the Florida Panthers were uneasy. Paul Maurice admitted as much. Two days earlier, his Panthers got blown out by the St. Louis Blues and, as much as Florida believed a day of rest would help to reboot, it was impossible to know exactly what would happen when they faced the Washington Capitals with a chance to move into a tie for the second wild card.

They spent the night before, though, at a team dinner and spent close to 48 hours thinking about their showdown the Capitals. They bought into the hype about this being a postseason game in February and played with the urgency to match.

For the first time in months, Florida is in real position to make the 2023 Stanley Cup playoffs after an emphatic 6-3 win in Washington.

“There’s a bit of an uneasy feeling in the morning today,” Maurice said Thursday, “but we were cooking right out of the gate.”

The win moved the Panthers into a tie with the Capitals for the second and final wild card in the Eastern Conference, and, even though Washington has played one fewer game, Florida will still meet the Capitals once more in April. The Panthers also have two games remaining with the Buffalo Sabres and one with the Detroit Red Wings, both of whom lead Florida in points percentage, but trail in the standings because they’ve played fewer games. The New York Islanders are the only other team behind the Panthers in the standings with a better points percentage, by just .001.

With 24 games still left to play, Florida is of course not yet celebrating, but the Panthers are exhaling. Their January was a sprint — at one point, they played 11 games in 19 days with nine of them on the road — and they survived to stay in the hunt into February. Now, they’ve effectively pulled even with the Capitals, who remain their fiercest competition for the No. 8 seed.

“We’ve got a lot of work to do,” defenseman Marc Staal said Thursday, “but that’s a good start.”

As an obvious backdrop to this run, Florida is far from where it expected to be at the start of the 2022-23 NHL season. The Panthers won their first Presidents’ Trophy last year, then hired one of the winningest coaches in NHL history and traded for superstar right wing Matthew Tkachuk. They expected to be a no-doubt playoff team — Maurice said as much in the preseason — even though they knew salary-cap constraints would make it tough to actually compete for the league’s best record again.

Instead, Florida has been sitting outside postseason position for more than two months and scrambling to get back into the race. By the end of January, the Panthers wanted to be something like four or five points out, Maurice said. By the end of February, they want to be at least even in the standings, ready to win a wild card down the stretch run.

“We expected a bit more,” forward Colin White said Thursday. “We’re definitely in the mix now.”

On Thursday, Florida looked something like the team it used to be and not just because it beat Washington at Capital One Arena in the first round of the 2022 Stanley Cup playoffs last year.

The Panthers’ depth showed up, with 10 point scorers and goals unlikely contributors like Staal, White and defenseman Gustav Forsling. Their stars did, too, with All-Star center Aleksander Barkov scoring the game-winning goal on a no-look shot in the second period. They scored at least six goals for only the fifth time all year after they did it 17 times last season.

They finally looked like a playoff team — they never never trailed, led by multiple goals for 37:17 of the final 38:28, led by three for more than 28 minutes and had 30 shots in the first two periods — and are now the favorites to grab the final playoff spot in the East, according to FiveThirtyEight.

“It’s huge,” Barkov told Bally Sports Florida on Thursday. “Everyone contributed in their own way.”

Forsling’s goal, which gave Florida a 1-0 lead in the first 10 minutes, was his eighth of the season. Staal’s, which put the Panthers up 2-0 in the first two minutes of the second period, was his first and White pushed the lead to 3-0 less than six minutes later after he was only inserted into the lineup because of center Sam Bennett got injured Tuesday.

Those were the signs, Maurice said, of a good night for Florida. A goal by Barkov — even a no-look one — isn’t a surprise to anyone and neither is another 28-save performance from Sergei Bobrovsky, who now has eight wins, a .925 save percentage and 2.53 goals against average in his last 11 starts.

“It was a complete game,” the star goaltender said Tuesday and a long-awaited reminder of what this team can be.

The fight is not over for the Panthers, but they’re no longer just trying to keep up.

“We’ve been talking about it since Christmas in here. We know we were that far out of it,” Staal said. “It’s going to be a grind right to the end, but we’re excited for the challenge. It’s been fun and hopefully we can keep it rolling.”