NHL - Panthers Eye Leafs After Record Historic Upset Over Bruins

While 2023 was the year of the upset in college basketball, the NHL certainly felt like getting in on the ground floor during the first round of the Stanley Cup playoffs. The Seattle Kraken, in just their second year of existence, toppled the defending champion Colorado Avalanche in Game Seven of their Western Conference quarterfinal on Sunday night.

Not to be outdone, the Florida Panthers not only upset the Boston Bruins just a few hours earlier, but handed the Bruins their second straight Game Seven loss on home ice.

The last being the 2019 Stanley Cup Finals, and you all know how much I revel in that one.

Boston put together an NHL-record 135 regular season points on the back of 65 wins. Their +128 goal differential was nearly double that of second-place Dallas (+67), and Boston was the only team to eclipse 300 goals on the season (305). The opening round matchup against the Florida Panthers was a difference of 44 points in the standings. Florida was the final team to qualify for the playoffs in the Eastern Conference, on the second-to-last day of the regular season.

After jumping out to a 3-1 series lead, Boston looked to dispatch the Cats on home ice last week. Florida staved off elimination with a 4-3 win in overtime, then laid seven goals on Vezina Trophy favorite Linus Ullmark in Game Six. Boston head coach Jim Montgomery sat Ullmark in favor of Jeremy Swayman for the deciding finale, which ultimately blew up in his face in a way that Florida goaltender Sergey Bobrovsky knows all too well.

In 2019, Bobrovsky was in net for the Columbus Blue Jackets, who swept the President’s Trophy winning Tampa Bay Lighting out of the first round of the playoffs. This makes the Russian the only player to have backstopped his team to eliminating the top team in the regular season in the first round.

Current Florida General Manager Bill Zito was a member of the Columbus front office that season as well.

As you can see, the series was full of momentum shifts, with nothing more evident than the final goal tallies. Boston finished with 27, Florida with 26.

I documented in late February that Boston was a team that was getting very old, very quickly. We saw captain Patrice Bergeron hugging teammates as they left the ice at TD Banknorth Garden after Game Seven, immediately leading to speculation if the 37-year-old played his final NHL game Sunday night.

Brandon Montour’s goal with 59.3 seconds remaining in regulation tied the game at 3-3, after Florida led 1-0 after one period, and 2-1 after two. It was Carter Verhaeghe’s goal at 8:35 of overtime that turned the Garden from raucous to respite, as a season with so much promise to this point was executed in a flash.

If anything else, hockey fans should be thanking the Panthers for their victory on Sunday, as we are saved from yet another Boston/Toronto playoff series. Keep in mind that the Panthers have made the second round in consecutive years, but have not advanced further since their lone run to the Stanley Cup Finals in 1995. The Maple Leafs won a playoff series on Saturday for the first time since 2004.

Remember that Florida won the President's Trophy last season, then were swept in the second round by Tampa.

Three teams (Vegas, Seattle and Florida) are all looking for their first championship, while Toronto is looking to break the longest drought in league history (55 years - 1967). Of the remaining teams left in the postseason, only Carolina and New Jersey have won the Stanley Cup this century, and Carolina is the only to have done so after the 2003-04 lockout.

While the Hart Memorial Trophy is looking to come down to either Edmonton’s Connor MacDavid, or Boston’s David Pastrnak, Florida captain Matthew Tkachuk put up 109 points on a wild card squad that just did the impossible this weekend.

Anyone who can have Brad (“Rat”) Marchand crying on the bench after losing a Game Seven instantly gets my vote.

-JC24