The Florida Panthers, so hot right now, right? Of course they are. Possibly everyone’s favourite team at the moment, outside of South Florida that is, but let’s just brush that aside for the time being.
Everything was seemingly going well for the Panthers as they shot up the Atlantic Division standings over the past few weeks.
Florida Panthers: Flying too Close to the Sun
They have the ageless wonder in Jaromir Jagr, who is obviously drinking from the fountain of youth (in one way or another). Jagr is leading the Panthers in scoring right now, and is playing the role of “wise elder” on this team. He has more NHL games played than the next five players, combined, beneath him in team scoring.
They also have an almost equally old, and almost equally entertaining, goaltender in Roberto Luongo, who is currently at the ripe age of 36 (he will be 37 by the time the playoffs roll around).
The Panthers also have a bevy of young stars who are putting together very respectable seasons; Aleksander Barkov, Aaron Ekblad, and Jonathan Huberdeau, among others, were all performing quite well during the stretch and are having respectable seasons.
With a little bit of tinkering from the “Hockey Gods,” Florida was able to put together their longest winning streak in franchise history. Their 12-game winning streak, unfortunately, came to end early last week at the hands of the Vancouver Canucks. Then they go out a couple days later and get torn apart by Sam Bennett and the Calgary Flames a couple of nights later. The Panthers then lose a 3rd straight game to the Tampa Bay Lightning and then, just last night, they managed to somehow lose to the Oilers. I’m not even going to make an Oilers joke here because anyone who is reading this already knows how bad the Oilers are.
What we are seeing here is the Florida Panthers inevitably crashing back down to Earth.
Realistically, we all should have seen this coming.
The Panthers were putting up unsustainable numbers during their run and their luck was eventually going to run out at some point.
Starting from the back end, they relied far too heavily on Luongo, who’s save percentage during the win streak was .959%. Obviously, no goalie in the world is going to be able to maintain that over a long period of time.
Moving up the ice, it seems they didn’t actually have the puck all that often. They were fifth to last in face-off wins during that time, and because of that, the only playoff team to have worse puck possession numbers than the Florida Panthers during the 12-game stretch was the Minnesota Wild. It might just be my common sense talking, but something is telling me that in order to consistently win games, you usually need to have the puck more than the other team.
Lastly, they had put up a PDO of 107.5, a considerably higher than the next team during that stretch, and VERY far away from the average of 100. As the statistics have shown over time, a regression toward a PDO of 100 is inevitable. And as the saying goes, they higher they climb, they harder they fall. What we’re seeing now with the Panthers is their crash back down to reality.
While the Panthers are by no means a bad team overall, if they don’t want to risk losing a playoff spot, they will have to do a couple things to maintain their position. In addition to improving on their puck possession numbers, Florida will need to find a way to provide more consistent defense, since Luongo is already starting to fall back to human-like numbers in the crease.
If not, it might be back to business as usual in South Florida.
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