By Dom Luszczyszyn, Sean Gentille and Shayna Goldman
Last spring, the Boston Bruins had big aspirations after a historic season in which they looked utterly unstoppable. The Florida Panthers had other plans with an epic upset that catapulted them all the way to the Stanley Cup Final and beyond.
That beyond is here: Florida is now the big dog in the Atlantic; the team to beat. The Panthers have grown into a powerhouse ready to prove last year’s run was no fluke.
Standing in their way is the team that set the table for them, only now, the tables have turned. Can the Bruins flip the script and get revenge?
The odds
Last year the Bruins had a 73 percent chance of getting by the Panthers, but ultimately the 27 percent prevailed.
One year later, the Bruins are in the exact opposite position, now sitting as 31 percent underdogs. A lot has changed since (on both sides) to lead to that conclusion.
That conclusion means Florida should take care of business. The Panthers have a stronger, deeper team with more stars and depth that can contribute at both ends of the ice. There’s more than enough to overwhelm a Bruins team with real deficiencies papered over by elite goaltending.
Of course, the same was true last year when the underdog prevailed. It could happen again, this time for the Bruins — a fitting twist for this growing Atlantic rivalry. That thirst for vengeance might make this a closer series than it looks on paper.
The numbers
The Panthers and Bruins are separated by 44 goals, which stems from the differences in their offense.
Florida’s a high-octane team that blends elite puck movement and a strong forecheck to challenge opponents. The Panthers thrive in transition and generate a lot of dangerous passes at five-on-five. Their biggest problem tends to be converting on those chances enough to match what they create, but that wasn’t the case in Round 1. That even-strength play, paired with a power play that has generated a ton of quality looks all year, adds up to a plus-46 Offensive Rating.
Boston, on the other hand, is down to minus-3 after Round 1. Similar to the regular season, the Bruins take a quality-over-quantity approach. Some teams manage to make more out of less, like Boston — but that can get tested against solid defensive teams like Florida.
The Panthers let a higher rate of quality chances back in Round 1 against the Tampa Bay Lightning compared to the regular season. But generally speaking, Florida’s an aggressive defending team at even strength and short-handed. And they’ve had super solid goaltending to support them from Sergei Bobrovsky.
This is where these teams match up a lot more closely, with just five goals between their Defensive Ratings.
Defense was a strength of the Bruins all year. At five-on-five, Boston didn’t give up many shots or scoring chances and had steady goaltending to back it up. Like Florida, it disrupts passes and doesn’t allow many rush chances back. But the Bruins can get exposed by their sloppy breakouts.
Similar to Florida, the Bruins conceded more shots and quality chances than usual in Round 1 at five-on-five. Unlike the Panthers, their penalty kill was pretty stout in their opening series. But the special teams battle is going to get a lot tougher for both sides of this matchup in Round 2.
The big question
What’s changed since last season’s epic seven-game clash?
Boston had a captain change during the offseason that you may have heard about, so we’ll start there. Patrice Bergeron’s retirement didn’t just remove the Bruins’ emotional core; it took a still-elite player out of the lineup. His departure, paired with second-line counterpart David Krejci’s, created a domino effect that pushed Charlie Coyle and Pavel Zacha from the third line to the 1C and 2C slots.
It’d be understandable to assume the biggest hit Boston took overall was at defense; it also wouldn’t be quite correct. Boston’s team Offensive Rating year over year has dropped 44 points, from plus-47 to plus-3. The decline starts at 1C, where Bergeron, even at 37, was a plus-6 offensive player. Mix in his defensive value (plus-4) and you’ve got a net drop of eight points when compared to Coyle, who replaced Bergeron as the everyday center for Jake DeBrusk and Brad Marchand.
Boston’s offensive dip might begin down the middle, but it extends throughout the lineup. Marchand put up 67 points for the second straight season, but his Net Rating dropped. Tyler Bertuzzi and Taylor Hall posted plus Offensive Ratings as third-line wingers; the 2023-24 Bruins had none of those. Some of that was unavoidable; last season, Boston parlayed a “Last Dance” mentality with short-term cap space to add effective rental players like Bertuzzi and Garnet Hathaway. Both would be upgrades on their 2023-24 analogs.
On the left side of the blue line, they’ve taken an even bigger year-over-year hit. Hampus Lindholm hasn’t been nearly as helpful to the offensive cause (plus-7 to zero), and they’ve gone from Dmitry Orlov (plus-5 Offensive Rating) as a third-pair luxury to Parker Wotherspoon (minus-3). The end result: a lineup, outside of David Pastrnak, that has seen a major, across-the-board drop in offensive effectiveness. That relative lack of firepower is the single biggest reason the script has flipped since the last time these teams saw each other in a playoff series.
The issue is also exacerbated by the Panthers’ overall improvements, mainly on defense. Matthew Tkachuk isn’t going to show up on Hart Trophy ballots for a second straight season, but he’s still elite — and Florida counterbalanced his slight dip with Sam Reinhart’s quantum leap. Reinhart was good last season, putting up 31 goals and nine at five-on-five. In 2023, his output jumped to 57 goals, including a league-leading 27 on the power play. His emergence as a true all-situations offensive force stands in stark contrast to what’s become of the Bruins’ wingers.
On defense, Brandon Montour and Aaron Ekblad have taken a step back as point producers but made up for some of that with improved defensive play. Gustav Forsling, meanwhile, took another step forward, becoming Florida’s most complete defenseman and serving as a bit of a shorthand for why this series’ initial outlook is so much different than the last.
The X-factor
Is David Pastrnak ready to step up and take over after being the Game 7 hero?
It’s not that Pastrnak had been bad for the first six games of the Bruins/Toronto Maple Leafs first-round series; as Boston jumped out to a 3-1 lead, he’d put up two goals, two primary assists and three positive Game Scores, including a 2.17 in Game 4 that led forwards on both teams. It’s that his production and overall play had noticeably dipped in Games 5 and 6, enough so for coach Jim Montgomery to publicly ask for more from his 47-goal winger. After all, it’s tough to close out a series when your best player is held off the scoresheet on consecutive nights.
Pastrnak understood. “I told Montgomery, ‘If I am the coach and you are me, I’d say the same thing,’” he said after Game 7. The goal he scored couldn’t have been more important.
Now his task will be to maintain momentum. Last postseason, he scored five goals in seven games against the Panthers, including three in Games 6 and 7. Boston lost those by a combined score of 11-8, but it’s hard to blame Pastrnak. At five-on-five with him on the ice, Boston won on expected goals, 3.6 to 1.92. It’s also worth noting that the Bruins controlled about 66 percent of the expected goals in Pastrnak’s 30:37 matched up with Aleksander Barkov. They’ll need more of the same.
The rosters
Florida’s power stems from its top end — a group that runs seven deep, well spread out between forwards and defensemen.
There are other contenders with four forwards north of a plus-10 Net Rating, but they don’t have the same strong backbone on the back end. Forsling has turned into one of the game’s best shutdown defensemen this year and is projected to deliver a plus-6 Defensive Rating, which is a top-three mark in the league. Between him and Ekblad, the Panthers boast one of the league’s best shutdown pairs — one that helped limit the damage that Tampa Bay’s best could muster in Round 1. That pair taking on tough minutes also frees up Montour to freewheel offensively, a key layer to Florida’s pressurized attack.
Some contenders can match that, but they don’t have nearly the same firepower up front. The Panthers have three forwards who grade out with an identical plus-20 Net Rating. There’s captain Barkov, the league’s best two-way forward. There’s his running-mate, Reinhart, who carries his own strong defensive pedigree while also scoring 50-plus goals this season. And then there’s Tkachuk, a sparkplug who generates a ton of offense and whose down year would be most players’ career year. Add Carter Verhaeghe, who has a penchant for heroics this time of year, and it’s a downright frightening quartet.
It helps too that those same players were operating at their expected high level against the Lightning. Over five games, they were projected to be worth 6.1 goals, and they delivered as promised at plus-6.7. Verhaeghe’s well-documented clutch factor was a huge part of that, but that’s also part of the luxury of having a well-balanced abundance of talent at the top. In any given series, it’s unlikely every star will be firing on all cylinders at once. But it is likely at least one or two can own the moment to carry the load, with the next series getting a stamp from someone else.
By Net Rating, Florida’s top seven skaters hold a 42-goal advantage over Boston’s — essentially the exact difference between the two teams in terms of their total makeup. If Florida beats Boston as expected, it may be as simple as “the Panthers had more great players.”
The Panthers aren’t just stars and scrubs, though. The supporting cast may not be spectacular, but it is well-rounded enough to push the team toward the league’s upper echelon. There aren’t a lot of holes to expose — aside from a fairly weak fourth line that was exposed a bit in Round 1. Aside from them, the third line is solid, Vladimir Tarasenko offers up offensive punch, and Sam Bennett is a terrific piece between the Clutch Brothers when healthy (he is expected to at least miss Game 1). On defense, Niko Mikkola has been a solid defensive foil next to Montour and the third pair has been more than adequate.
If there’s a weakness that can be exploited in Florida, it’s between the pipes. We saw Bobrovsky at his best in last year’s playoffs and in spurts this season. The Panthers win easily with him at the helm when he’s at the top of his game. Bobrovsky doesn’t even have to be elite for Florida to win this series, the Panthers are more than capable enough elsewhere. But the potential to be bad enough to lose the series for Florida is one that also lingers in the background.
Bobrovsky is far from safe or reliable — a direct contrast from what Boston has in both Jeremy Swayman and Linus Ullmark.
Goaltending is Boston’s largest advantage. That’s especially true if Swayman can continue to harness the frustrating series-stealing energy he showed in Round 1 where his .950 save percentage was one of the best marks ever in a single series. In six games he saved 8.4 goals above expected, the highest mark of any goalie.
Even if he falters or the Bruins opt to go back to their rotation, Boston has the best “second” option in the league with Ullmark ready to step in if necessary.
The Bruins having the two best goalies in the series is a nice luxury, but there’s unfortunately only one net and several holes in front of the team that the Panthers can take advantage of.
Up front, that starts with the team’s top two centers, a dire one-two punch that was outchanced against Toronto and struggled to deliver any semblance of offense. That puts more pressure on key wingers Pastrnak, Marchand and DeBrusk to produce. While that may have worked against a Leafs team whose biggest enemy is itself, it’s going to be a lot more difficult against a Panthers team that has more firepower and is much stingier.
The key for Boston may be understanding its best bet is trying to slow things down to dampen the damage. On one hand, Charlie Coyle was on for only 33 percent of the five-on-five goals in Round 1. On the other, he was only outscored 2-1 — big whoop.
Slowing the opposing attack and creating a safe space for Boston’s elite goaltending to shine is what worked against Toronto. The Bruins will have to do the same against an even scarier opponent. The Bruins defense is well-equipped to handle that with a defensive trifecta of Charlie McAvoy, Lindholm and Brandon Carlo. The trio may not be offensively on par with Florida’s, but it handles its business well defensively. Carlo especially was excellent in Round 1.
A lot hinges on McAvoy being an all-around force. While the Panthers may have the better top end, an argument can be made that the best forward, defenseman and goalie are all on Boston’s side. If Pastrnak, McAvoy and Swayman can make that difference felt, the Bruins have a shot. It’s just a real uphill climb elsewhere.
The key matchup
Matthew Tkachuk vs. Brad Marchand
The most eye-catching matchup of this series? One between two highly skilled rat kings in Marchand and Tkachuk.
Tkachuk comes into the series as one of the most valuable forwards, with a plus-20 Net Rating that is tied with Barkov, Reinhart and Pastrnak. His goal scoring may have slipped this year, but he’s been an elite playmaker at even strength and on the power play to give the Panthers an edge in his minutes.
With nine points in five games, Tkachuk put his stamp on Round 1. He delivered offensively but didn’t dominate his minutes as much at five-on-five, especially when matching up head-to-head against Victor Hedman. Florida outscored Tampa Bay 5-3 and had the slight edge in scoring chances in his minutes, which doesn’t quite meet the high bar he set for himself last spring. But the Bruins saw firsthand last postseason what a playoff menace he can be, whether he’s making them pay on the scoresheet or bringing that disruptive energy, and that’s what they have to anticipate this series.
That’s Marchand’s specialty as well. Balancing pest-like tendencies with high-end skill is an art that Marchand is elite at. That got the Leafs off their game at times in Round 1 and could be a distraction for Florida as well. Against Toronto, Marchand and the Bruins had a slight edge in expected and actual goals at five-on-five. After Auston Matthews and Mitch Marner, Marchand will now likely get a heavy dose of Tkachuk to open the series.
Who ends up driving those minutes may come down to who can play through each other’s rat king tactics versus who gets distracted and derailed by it.
The bottom line
The “rematch” angle is irresistible for a reason — Florida ruined things for the Bruins in 2023-24, and now the Bruins have an opportunity to turn the tables. Plus, Boston just prevented a second straight first-round collapse. That counts for something.
Still, one side has gotten better, and one has gotten worse. Florida’s edge is too significant to ignore.
References
How these projections work
Understanding projection uncertainty
Resources
Evolving Hockey
Natural Stat Trick
Hockey Reference
NHL
All Three Zones Tracking by Corey Sznajder
(Photo of David Pastrnak chipping the puck past Matthew Tkachuk: Bob DeChiara / USA Today)
