At the end of practice Wednesday in Sunrise, the Florida Panthers played a half-ice, scrimmage-type game and at the end of the game, the losers had to skate laps.
It’s nearly the end of February, more than 50 games into the season, and the Panthers were sitting atop the Eastern Conference, yet no one was happy with their last performance. Florida, which boasts the best home record in the league, blew a lead in the final 10 minutes to the Nashville Predators on Tuesday for only its fourth loss at FLA Live Arena all season.
It was not reason for panic, but still a rare chance to take a hard look at some of the Panthers’ deepest flaws.
“We do want to win them all,” forward Sam Bennett said Wednesday after committing a costly penalty in the final six minutes, leading to the Predators’ game-winning power-play goal. “We feel like we can.”
In the immediate aftermath of the 6-4 loss, interim coach Andrew Brunette mentioned a handful of costly mistakes, particularly in the third period after Florida took its third and final one-goal lead. Nashville tied the game on a short-handed goal after the Panthers (35-11-3) got sloppy in the offensive zone and gave up a breakaway, and scored the game-winner on a power play after a needless offensive-zone penalty.
Both, incidentally, were part of larger troubling patterns — really maybe the only troubling patterns — for the best team in the Eastern Conference. Florida has committed the eighth most penalties in the NHL and its penalty kill ranks in the bottom half of the league at 79.0 percent. The shorthanded goal wasn’t a particular outlier, either — the Panthers have given up five, tying them for eighth worst in the league — and Florida, at all strengths, is tied for the 10th most high-danger chances allowed because they too frequently give up breakaways like the one winger Tanner Jeannot got on the Predators’ penalty kill.
All season, Brunette has picked nits with the high-octane Panthers’ tendency to get “sloppy” or lose some “discipline” in favor of trying to make the spectacular. It was evident Tuesday, when they had a 80-41 advantage in shot attempts and only a 20-15 edge in high-danger chances, and it was a focus point Wednesday as they prepared to face the Columbus Blue Jackets at 7 p.m. back in South Florida on Thursday.
“We can’t get into this mind-set that we can turn things on and turn things off in the course of a game,” Brunette said. “We went through parts where we played really well and just kind of felt comfortable, and then we got sloppy and then they’d turn it on again.”
For most of the year, this knack to snap out of funks in the nick of time has been a defining part of the Panthers’ identity — they tout the “Comeback Cats” moniker because they’re tied for the league lead with 17 come-from-behind wins — and it’s a nice luxury to have, but probably not sustainable come the Stanley Cup playoffs.
“When you turn it on and off, you only can really have so many times that you can do that or the hot water doesn’t come,” Brunette said. “The hot water didn’t come on late in the game.”
Still, the loss was an extreme outlier. In its other three home losses, Florida was trailing at the second intermission and two of those losses came while the Panthers were severely shorthanded because of a COVID-19 outbreak.
They expect to bounce back against the Blue Jackets (26-23-1) on Thursday because it’s what they’ve done all season, they just don’t want to miss out on a chance to learn a lesson.
“There’s no easy games in this league,” star center Aleksander Barkov said. “I don’t think we played the best way possible.”
Brunette weighs Panthers lineup changes
Radko Gudas, who scored his first goal of the season Tuesday, didn’t take part in practice Wednesday, but it was only a maintenance day for the 31-year-old defenseman, Brunette said. Everyone else on the active roster practiced, plus 42-year-old forward Joe Thornton, who went on injured reserve with an unspecified injury last Wednesday.
While the forward lines stayed the same as Tuesday, Brunette said he hadn’t thought yet about potential lineup changes and didn’t rule anything out. Noel Acciari and Frank Vatrano were both inactive Tuesday as fellow winger Maxim Mamin came off IR to rejoin the top line.
Brunette also didn’t say Sergei Bobrovsky would for sure be in goal Friday. The goaltender has started all four games since the All-Star break — if he starts Thursday, it’ll be five games in nine days — and had his second worst save percentage of the season Tuesday.
