The Florida Panthers made it all look inevitable and unpreventable by the end Wednesday, the way the best teams do, as if by the end there was nothing Tampa Bay could do to shake its fate.
Would Tampa Bay win a game at home if they played the full series there? Could Nikita Kucherov, the league’s top point scorer, unshackle himself of this Panthers defense for a goal, just one, if it was a best-of-nine series?
It seemed like an inescapable conclusion as Wednesday wore on, this Panthers 6-3 win in Game 5 to take their best-of-seven series, 4-1.
But it wasn’t inevitable. None of it. Not when five games ago Matthew Tkachuk wasn’t certain to play, no one knew how Sam Bennett’s rest or Aaron Ekblad’s absence would matter. It wasn’t inevitable when Tampa Bay was four minutes from tying the series in Game 4.
So, just like that, it felt like after a long regular season the curtain really went up on the defending champs in a way. Here’s who we are, they were saying this series. This is how we’ll play again from here to the end.
“We’ve got more to show,’’ Bennett said. “We got a taste of how deep our team is. There is even another level that we have.”
The Panthers won any way the night asked this series. They won two games being an offense scoring six goals, and they won a game with goalie Sergei Bobrovsky pitching a shutout. They won taking 16 shots. They won holding the fifth-ranked power play this year to two goals in the series, including an 0-for-14 stretch.
The Panthers won taking cheap hits and delivering hits just as cheap. Their high-end talent can go in the gutter with anyone, as everyone knows. That’s part of their charm.
“Two teams right in their prime,’’ Panthers coach Paul Maurice said of this series. “Very competitive. It got nasty this year because of the playoffs last year. We’re also in the same place with our teams – legitimate teams.”
The Panthers idea to repeat this season started in repetitive style. It opened with the same five-game series win against Tampa Bay that it did on last year’s run to the Stanley Cup.
So, they’ve won eight of the past 10 playoff games against their big rival, meaning there are bigger rivals ahead for the Panthers. Deeper teams, too.
You saw the Panthers depth in the margins with the presence of veteran center Nico Sturm, acquired at the trade deadline, meaning Aleksander Barkov can spend less time killing penalties.
You saw that depth on the scoring sheet Wednesday, too. Brad Marchand made two nifty moves and cross-ices passes for goals to Anton Lundell and Eeto Luostarinen. That’s the third Panthers line. It had four goals in the series’ final two games.
“They can go with their depth where lots of teams can’t,’’ Lightning coach Jon Cooper said.
The next stop is the winner of the Toronto-Ottawa series. Toronto leads 3-2. The Panthers will be happy to wait. And rest. And look back at their rival saying good-bye to a season.
It’s always better to have a rival you respect amid the hate, and that’s the case with at two-time champion Tampa Bay team. Cooper knows greatness. He saw it on the other side this series.
“They have an exceptional team,’’ Cooper said of the Panthers. “Not just an average team. An exceptional team.”
Cooper sat in the first moments of his offseason tracing the Panthers run to that comeback from down 3-1 in Boston two springs ago. He talk how they “sniffed” the championship that year before taking it last year.
“Now they know how to do it,’’ he said. “There’s only a few teams in the last little while that have really known how to do it. We were one of them. Now they are one of them. It is unfortunate we had to run into them.”
It all felt inevitable by the end of this series in a manner it didn’t before Game 1. The Panthers unveiled the next-level Panthers against Tampa Bay. No doubt they’ll need the more levels Bennett sees in this team coming up.
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