Panthers Provide a Blueprint for the NHL

Sam Bennett won the Conn Smythe trophy for most valuable player in the NHL playoffs. It was well earned. Bennett led the Florida Panthers with 15 goals and 22 points in 23 postseason games. He was by far the most consistent player for his team, and whether he stays in South Florida or goes elsewhere this summer, he will be richly and justly rewarded with his next contract.

But the one trophy that has yet to be awarded is the Jim Gregory award for top executive of the year. If anyone other than Bill Zito wins it, there oughta be an investigation. The job he has done transforming the Panthers from a middling team into a dynasty should be a blueprint for every general manager in the league, including a certain individual currently employed at 4 Penn Plaza.

Since he was hired in 2020, Zito has signed or traded for Sam Bennett (C) and Matthew Tkachuk (LW) from the Calgary Flames, Sam Reinhart (RW) from the Buffalo Sabres, Carter Verhaeghe (LW) from the Tampa Bay Lightning, Evan Rodrigues (LW) from the Colorado Avalanche, Niko Mikkola (D) from the New York Rangers, Gustav Forsling (D) and Seth Jones (D) from the Chicago Blackhawks, Eetu Luostarinen (LW) from the Carolina Hurricanes, Brad Marchand (RW) and Jesper Boqvist (C) from the Boston Bruins, Tomas Nosek (C) from the New Jersey Devils, and Nate Schmidt (D) and Paul Maurice (coach) from the Winnipeg Jets. In short, more than half of the Stanley Cup winning team came from elsewhere.

In a sport that defines success by how many home-grown players a team has, the Panthers are a text-book example of how to shop wisely. No organization does it better. Just look at their top nine:

Verhaeghe - Alesander Barkov - Reinhart

Rodrigues - Bennett - Tkachuk 

Luostarinen - Anton Lundell - Marchand 

Only Barkov and Lundell were drafted by the Panthers. That's it. Everyone else came from outside the organization.

Zito is not the first GM to build a championship team mostly through trades. In the 1990s, Neil Smith broke a Rangers 54 year Cup drought by importing Adam Graves, Jeff Beukaboom, Mark Messier, Esa Tikkanen, Kevin Lowe, Steve Larmer, Stephan Matteau, Brian Noonan, Craig MacTavish, Glenn Anderson, Doug Lidster and Glenn Healy. What is remarkable is that he's managed to do it in the cap era where general managers routinely pull their hair out trying to field a competitive roster and still stay cap compliant. 

His secret sauce has been the way he's managed the cap. Like Julien BriseBois of the Tampa Bay Lightning before him, Zito has not signed one player to a contract with an AAV higher than $10 million. What this means is that he has the cap space needed to fill out his roster with solid bottom six players while some teams struggle to assemble a top six.

For example, the Panthers cap hit for Barkov, Tkachuk, Reinhart, Verhaeghe and Bobrovsky comes to $45.1 million. The Edmonton Oilers cap hit for just Leon Draisaitl and Connor McDavid is $26.5 million. There's no doubt that both these players are among the best in the NHL, but you have to ask yourself whether any hockey team can win a Stanley Cup with so much salary tied up in two players. And keep in mind, McDavid will be a UFA after the 2025-26 season. His next contract could well have an AAV of $17 million or higher. Even with the salary cap expected to go up to $104m in 2026 and $113m in 2027, the Oilers might be better off borrowing a page from the Panthers playbook and moving on.

Indeed, five of the last six Stanley Cup winners - the Lightning twice, the Vegas Golden Knights once and the Panthers twice - do not have a single player with an AAV over $10 million. Meanwhile, the team with the most front-loaded roster in the league - the Toronto Maple Leafs - have made it to the second round twice in the last eight seasons. That cannot be a coincidence.

What it tells us is that having the best player in a series is no guarantee of success. Indeed, it's almost a curse. If I were the GM of a team with Cup aspirations, I would emulate what Zito and BriseBois have done with their respective teams. Both have stumbled on to something; something that most fans don't understand. You don't need world-class talent to win in today's NHL. What you need is depth and solid goaltending. The Oilers had neither in these finals, and it showed.

Call me "delusional," or any name you want, but I don't think the hockey fans in South Florida care in the slightest that number 97 doesn't play for their team. They have two Cups, and the last time I checked, that's two more than the Oilers have won in this century.

Come to think of it, it's one more than the Rangers have won since World War II.

Ouch!

Goody Enough

For sixty minutes, the New York Rangers threw everything they had at the Florida Panthers. They fought tooth and nail for every inch of ice. They scraped, they clawed, they hit and they got hit. They were twice the team they were in game one. And all it got them was a 1-1 tie going into overtime. The Panthers, having won game one at the Garden 3-0, and with it home ice, were playing with house money. A win would give them a stranglehold on the series going back to their home arena. The Rangers were looking at an almost impossible task, one that only one team since 1945 had accomplished: winning a best of seven conference or league final series after dropping the first two games at home.

Barclay Goodrow's snapshot from the slot at 14:01 of OT didn't just win the game for the Rangers, it saved their season. If ever there was a must win situation, last night was it. So now the Presidents' Trophy winners get an opportunity to recapture home ice with a split in Sunrise, Florida. The hockey gods were indeed merciful, for a change.

But while Goodrow's teammates celebrated their good fortune, there is still much work that needs to be done if this team is to advance to the finals for the first time since 2014, and only the second time since their Cup year of 1994. For starters, the special teams have been anything but special of late. After going 11-25 on the power play in their first six postseason games, the Rangers have gone 1-16 over their last six, including 0-4 last night. The Rangers record over those first six games was 6-0; over the last six, it's 3-3.

The concern is palpable. Going into this series with the Panthers, the Rangers had two advantages going for them: their goaltending and their power play. Well, Igor Shesterkin has held up his end of the bargain. The former Vezina Trophy winner has gone toe to toe with Sergei Bobrovsky. Not counting the own goal Alexis Lafreniere deflected past him in game one, Shesterkin has stopped 51 of 53 shots on goal for a .962 save percentage through two games. That's the sort of brilliance that can earn a player the Conn-Smythe Award.

But no matter how brilliant Igor may be, he cannot drag this team across the finish line all by himself. He needs help. Put succinctly, there is no pathway to a Stanley Cup for the Rangers that doesn't include a productive power play. None. Their 5v5 play simply isn't good enough. During the regular season, New York had a GF% of 50.15 at 5v5. By contrast, Florida was 56.57. The fact is the Rangers got lucky last night. They actually outscored the Panthers 2-0 at even strength. Depending on that luck to continue would be foolhardy.

The problem is a familiar one. For all the elite talent on this team, the Rangers power play remains as predictable as dirt. They tried mixing it up a bit against the Washington Capitals and Carolina Hurricanes, and, eureka, it worked. But then like a drunk on a bender, the old habits returned. Since game three of the Canes series, the Blueshirts have stubbornly resisted even tweaking their power play. The results - one power play goal in the last six games - speak for themselves. The Panthers know exactly what's coming and they are prepared for it. In the first two games of this series, the Rangers have yet to register a single high-danger scoring chance with the man advantage. If Peter Laviolette and his staff don't rectify this problem soon, game five will be the last home game of the season for this team.

But even if they manage to fix the power play, there's one more nagging issue that besets them. The Rangers continue to have trouble exiting the defensive zone. While not as proficient as game one, Florida was still able to pin New York in its own end most of the game. The lack of clean exits is bound to take its toll as the series progresses, especially the way the Panthers take the body. The Rangers must find a way to get the puck into the neutral zone that doesn't involve multiple hits along the boards. Laviolette was hired because of his ability to make adjustments on the fly. Now would be a good time to make at least two of them.

Game three is Sunday afternoon. The Rangers are tied with the Panthers. They have Barclay Goodrow to thank for that.

The Rangers Send a Strong Message

That wasn't Louis Domingue between the pipes for the Tampa Bay Lightning last night; nor was it Antti Raanta. That was none other than Andrei Vasilevskiy, last year's Conn Smythe trophy winner, the goaltender universally acknowledged as the finest in the world, and the man who in the last series posted a .981 save percentage against the NHL's number one offense. Well, when the Rangers were done, they wound up scoring twice as many goals in one game as Vasilevskiy allowed in the last four.

To add insult to injury, his "understudy" two hundred feet away stole the show. Igor Shesterkin stopped 37 of 39 shots, or as it's better known around the organization, just another day at the office. The Rangers skated circles around the two-time Stanley Cup champs, who admittedly looked rusty from being off for nine days. They threw their weight around and took advantage of the passing lanes they seldom saw against the Carolina Hurricanes. Artemi Panarin must've felt like a prisoner out on parole with all the freedom he had to maneuver with the puck. His cross-ice pass set up Mika Zibanejad's power play goal that capped off the scoring for the Blueshirts.

It was nice having a laugher for once; it was even nicer having a lead in a series, something the Rangers have failed to do throughout these playoffs. For once, the haters couldn't dismiss what happened on the ice. There were no scrub goalies to take advantage of, no Jacob Trouba hits leading to key players being concussed, no missed penalties leading to game-tying goals. The Rangers played a full sixty minutes of hockey against a legitimate Cup contender and for the better part of the contest were the better team.

New York had six players with two points, eleven with at least one. The top three lines all contributed to the scoring with Filip Chytil leading the way with two goals in the second period; the latter coming off a brilliant cross-ice pass from Alexis Lafreniere that Vasilevskiy had no chance on. Once more, the kid line was the most consistent line on the ice for the Rangers.

Yes, I get it, it was only one game, and yes, that wasn't the Pittsburgh Penguins the Rangers were playing out there; it was the Tampa Bay Lightning, the team looking to become only the fourth team in NHL history to win at least three consecutive Stanley Cups. The Toronto Maple Leafs, Montreal Canadiens and New York Islanders are the other three. The Bolts will almost certainly step up their game Friday night. They will have no choice, because that wasn't the Florida Panthers they were playing out there either. The Puddy Tats, as I wrote ad nauseam, were a deeply flawed team that was destined to fail once the playoffs began. These Rangers are the exact polar opposite of that team: resilient, persistent and determined. They may go down, but not without one helluva fight.

And regarding whether or not that happens, two things are worth noting here. The first has to do with historical trends. According to Stat Boy Steven, since 2000, teams that took a full seven games to dispose of their lower round opponents were 7-0 against teams that swept theirs. Apparently, having all that time off does more harm than good. The second has to do more with the style of play the Lightning employ. Put succinctly, the Rangers enjoy playing that style of hockey. It suits them well. Forwards like Zibanejad and Panarin have more room to create on the rush. That may explain why they went 3-0 against Tampa during the regular season. If I were Jon Cooper, I'd be more worried about the latter than the former. I haven't seen the Rangers this pumped to play an opponent in years. Compared to the Hurricanes, the Lightning are a walk in the park.

Bottom line, this is going to be a long and exciting series; one in which the team that prevails will be the prohibitive favorite to capture the Cup. Buckle up.