The Florida Panthers enter the final weeks of the regular season fighting with the Boston Bruins for the No. 1 seed in the East and confident about their style of play.
FORT LAUDERDALE — The stretch run to the playoffs has begun, Florida Panthers-style, meaning Matthew Tkachuk goes with no hesitation from talking about his team scoring nine goals last game against Tampa Bay to verbally balling up their fists for Tuesday’s game against Ottawa.
“It’s always fun to play Brady,” Tkachuk said of his younger brother, the Ottawa captain. “A lot of family will be here.”
Brady started a last-minute melee between these teams last meeting.
“We don’t forget in here, that was a very intense game, and I’m sure the boys will be ready to go,” Matthew Tkachuk said.
This is the best part of this best Panthers team ever assembled. They can be ice-ballet beautiful and methodically bullying on the same line. Sam Reinhart is second in the league with 39 goals. Tkachuk has scored more points than anyone in hockey since Jan. 1.
But ask what impressed the most of that nine-goal blitz in Tampa and it’s not the offense.
“I like the way when the game got to 5- or 6-1, we didn’t change at all,” Tkachuk said. “Even at the end we were hitting, playing chippy, playing physical.”
For so many years, the starved hockey fan in South Florida saw only questions and internal drama as February turned to March. Remember the mocking? The criticism? All the self-incriminating poison for so much of the past quarter-century over who was running the team — and who should be?
Could they even make the playoffs?
The questions didn’t just change when general manager Bill Zito came in the door four years ago and with their run to the Stanley Cup Final last year. Everything did. They’re built so they’re scrabbling with Boston for first in the East right now. Tkachuk followed Reinhart in being named one of the NHL’s three weekly stars.
They’re also one win away from tying the record 12 consecutive victories on the road, a feat coach Paul Maurice understandably doesn’t quite know what to do with.
“It feels a little bit less, to be honest with you,” he said.
The Panthers last lost on the road Dec. 18 in Calgary. But for all their good they’ve since had a four-game losing streak at home. And there was the added buffer of the All-Star break.
“It doesn’t feel connected,” Maurice said of the road streak.. “If you played nine straight on the road and won them that’d be different.”
Maurice is more concerned with honing this team’s defense-first identity in these final weeks before the playoffs. An offseason priority was improving a penalty-killing unit that ranked 14 of the 16 playoff teams at 70 percent last spring.
It’s 83.1 percent, fifth in the league, this regular season. That’s one reason for goalie Sergei Bobrovsky’s 2.41 goals-against average this regular season compared to his 3.07 average last year.
The other reason? Confidence from last year’s playoff run, Bobrovsky has said. Just as all the players say about their games.
Perhaps the best example of the good place the Panthers stand is this: The team captain, Aleksander Barkov, has just one goal in two months and it’s not affected anything. Sure, it’s diluted by his 24 assists and smothering defense over that stretch. But one goal? That’s what the smell of winning covers.
For the first time in team history, the Panthers have a stretch run where the issue isn’t team make-up or just making the playoffs. It’s how to be best positioned for them.
How important is the No. 1 seed in the Eastern Conference? Would they rather meet an aging champion like Tampa Bay or a feisty up-and-coming team like Detroit in the opening round?
How much rest should players take? Body maintenance has contaminated the NBA. It’s not a term in the NHL, even if you watched the line of Panthers heading to surgery after the playoffs last year and wonder if it should be.
All that’s the subtext to what plays out on nights like Tuesday in a game Panthers players are calling the “Tkachuk Bowl.” After the Panthers scored nine goals comes a night dripping with such Tkachuk-osterone that fists are balled in anticipation.
That sounds fine, too. The beauty of these Panthers, you see, is they can be beasts when needed.
