The Florida Panthers were not openly rooting for anyone Saturday when the Tampa Bay Lightning took down the Toronto Maple Leafs in Game 7 of their first-round series.
A day later, they couldn’t help but be excited about the outcome, though.
“In the end,” defenseman Brandon Montour said, “I think a lot of guys wanted to play this team.”
A second-round series between the Panthers and Lightning is a chance to keep building one of the NHL’s best up-and-coming rivalries, and for Florida to get revenge for how its season ended a year ago.
Last year was — at the time — the best in the Panthers’ history, setting a then-franchise record for points percentage to earn the No. 2 seed in the Atlantic Division, only to lose in six games to Tampa Bay in the first round of the 2021 Stanley Cup playoffs. The Lightning went on to win its second straight Stanley Cup.
This year has been better by every single measure — Florida broke its franchise record for points percentage, claimed the Presidents’ Trophy for the first time and Friday won its first postseason series since its run to the 1996 Stanley Cup Finals in just its third season as a team — and now the Panthers will get a shot at redemption when Round 2 begins later this week. They’ll once again get to host Games 1 and 2 at FLA Live Arena in Sunrise — plus Games 5 and 7, if necessary — and are the favorite to come out of the Eastern Conference, according to Caesars Entertainment, after beating the Washington Capitals in six games in Round 1.
“It’s an exciting challenge for us,” interim coach Andrew Brunette said. “They’re what we want to be and we have an opportunity to play them again to get that chance, so it’s been a fun rivalry the last two years. They beat us in the playoffs. They’re up and we get an opportunity to even it.
“They really helped us. I said this early in the year and a lot of the year: They helped make us a better team. We kind of saw firsthand how hard it is and what it takes, and playing against them is always a challenge and I think we saw what it was.”
Brunette: ‘Hard’ to bench Duclair
Brunette’s boldest decision of the first round — maybe his boldest decision so far as a coach — came in Game 6 on Friday, when he decided to bench winger Anthony Duclair in favor of left wing Ryan Lomberg.
The move wound up paying off — Lomberg scored a game-tying goal in the first period as Florida went on to win 4-3 in overtime — but Brunette said it was “a hard decision.” Duclair, after all, spent most of the year as a top-six forward for the Panthers and finished third on the team with 31 goals in the regular season, while Lomberg hadn’t played since getting benched after Game 1.
Duclair, however, only put one shot on goal in the first five games of the series. Brunette, who rose into the interim role in the first month of the season after former coach Joel Quenneville resigned amid revelations about his mishandling of a 2010 sexual-assault allegation while he was coaching the Chicago Blackhawks, felt empowered to take a risk and trust Lomberg — a playoff hero in 2021 — would come through and he did.
Still, South Florida has probably not seen the last of Duclair, Brunette said.
“He’s played so well for us this year. It made it even harder, but you’ve got to make hard decisions and, again, I don’t think he made the impact that he’s capable of and he was trying,” Brunette said. “We’re going to need him and he needs to make more of an impact than he’s made, and he will. ... He just needs to figure out playoff hockey a little bit.”
Marchment doubtful for Game 1
As the Panthers returned to practice Sunday at the Florida Panthers IceDen in Coral Springs, only two top-six forwards — Aleksander Barkov and Sam Reinhart — and none of their top-four defensemen from the end of the first round took part.
With a few days off before Game 1, Aaron Ekblad and Ben Chiarot, who both played through injury Friday, could get extra time to recover and Brunette said both defensemen should be available for the start of the second round.
Mason Marchment will likely be out for Game 1, though. The winger missed the final two games against the Capitals and didn’t even travel to Washington for Game 6 because of an unspecified injury.
