Schedule (ET)

Date	Game	Time
Thursday, May 18	1. Florida at Carolina	8 p.m. ET
Saturday, May 20	2. Florida at Carolina	8 p.m. ET
Monday, May 22	3. Carolina at Florida	8 p.m. ET
Wednesday, May 24	4. Carolina at Florida	8 p.m. ET
*Friday, May 26	5. Florida at Carolina	8 p.m. ET
*Sunday, May 28	6. Carolina at Florida	8 p.m. ET
*Tuesday, May 30	7. Florida at Carolina	8 p.m. ET

The Skinny

Though we are not clairvoyant here at Daily Faceoff, the basis of our site is that we know something about hockey. Nonetheless, over four series previews, neither the Carolina Hurricanes nor the Florida Panthers were tabbed to win once by our staff. Whoops. It has been that kind of postseason in the East, and after two rounds of playoff hockey, all the twists and turns have led us here: a best-of-seven series between the Panthers and Hurricanes with a berth in the Stanley Cup Final on the line.

The Hurricanes will feel they deserve that spot. They have won their division three years running and appear in the conference final for the first time since Rod Brind’Amour’s rookie season behind the bench. The Hurricanes have shed an underachieving reputation and silenced suggestions that the playoffs are too much for them. After comfortably winning a tense series with the New York Islanders, Carolina’s offense, at last, overcame its laundry list of injuries to blow the New Jersey Devils to pieces in five games. All that’s left is to blast through the wild-card Panthers and advance to the Stanley Cup Final.

Good luck telling that to Florida. The Panthers have already dispatched two teams who felt that their destiny was a date with the Stanley Cup, and they will have no qualms about repeating the trick a third time. Matthew Tkachuk and Sergei Bobrovsky led the Cats to three consecutive elimination game victories over the record-setting Boston Bruins before embarrassing a presumptuous Maple Leafs outfit in five games. Who remembers those “We want Florida” chants? The Panthers have been playing for their lives for two months now. If they were not afraid of Boston or Toronto, why should they wilt in the face of the Hurricanes’ challenge?

Head-to-Head

Carolina: 2-1

Florida: 1-2

Over three meetings this season, the Panthers and Hurricanes traded shutouts before the new year. The latter decisively carried their last meeting in April.

The Panthers won the first contest 3-0 before a 4-0 rebuttal by Carolina in their last game of 2022. The rubber match finished 6-4 in favor of the Hurricanes in a wild contest during which each team scored four goals in the final frame. Despite what the ’80s scoreline might suggest, Carolina controlled most of the game and led 4-2 with three minutes remaining.

Notably, the Hurricanes have not faced Bobrovksy this season. The Metropolitan Division champs split their meetings with Spencer Knight, who is absent for personal reasons, before getting the better of Alex Lyon late in the season.

Top Five Scorers

Carolina

Sebastian Aho, 10 points
Jordan Martinook, 10 points
Jesper Fast, 8 points
Seth Jarvis, 8 points
Brent Burns, 8 points

Florida

Matthew Tkachuk, 16 points
Carter Verhaeghe, 12 points
Brandon Montour, 9 points
Alexander Barkov, 9 points
Sam Reinhart, 8 points

X-Factor

Playoff hockey is all about sustainability, and one has to wonder just how sustainable the brilliance of Bobrovsky is. The 34-year-old turned back the clock to his Vezina-winning Columbus days to stifle the 65-win Bruins and star-studded Maple Leafs en route to a 7-2 record. 

‘Bob’ took his job back from Alex Lyon three games into the first round and has been lights-out since a 33-save outing in Game 7 against Boston. His 2.81 GAA and .918 save percentage far exceed the averages of what was a pedestrian regular season. Bobrovsky has only ever played this well during the postseason in 2019 and has not been this good since Florida made him a $10M dollar man the following offseason. Panthers fans could be forgiven for wondering if the goaltender in front of them is too good to be true. 

Of Bobrovsky’s seven victories, Florida has claimed just two by multi-goal margins. The Panthers were not exactly known for their defense during a regular season when they surrendered the 12th-most goals in the NHL, and they have needed the Russian to be this good to advance as far as they have. Lyon has already turned into a pumpkin; what happens if Bobrovsky also comes back down to Earth?

Offense

Jordan Martinook had one of the best second rounds in recent memory against New Jersey. The veteran Hurricane was not kept off the board once during the series and recorded four multi-point efforts on his way to collecting 10 points in 5 games.

Though he was a world-beater these past two weeks, Martinook will not win the Conn Smythe. The 30-year-old is a career third-liner who has never scored more than 34 points in a season. He will cool off eventually, but it’s not Martinook himself that the Hurricanes have come to rely on so much as what his explosion represents: depth scoring.

Brind’Amour’s team knows they do not have a Nikita Kucherov or a Sidney Crosby to drive their offense. They must produce throughout the lineup to keep up with more talented teams like New Jersey or Florida. After a first round during which Carolina relied heavily on de facto stars Sebastian Aho and Brent Burns for production, the rest of their team broke out and scored an incredible 4.8 goals per game against the Devils. The months-long lull that followed Andrei Svechnikov’s knee injury is finally over.

Carolina’s team shooting percentage has ballooned from a seventh-worst 9.2 during the regular season to a fourth-best 10.9 during the playoffs. That is telling on the score sheet when a team outshoots its opposition at a league-best rate. Martinook stole all the headlines, but a whopping 12 Hurricanes, including captain Jordan Staal (2G, 6P) and second-line center Jesperi Kotkaniemi (3G, 5P), recorded 3 points or more in their 5 games against New Jersey. Martin Necas, who led the team in regular-season points (71), notably thawed out with 3 goals after an anonymous first round.

Whereas Carolina has relied on a scoring-by-committee approach, Florida has big guns and is not afraid to use them. Carter Verhaeghe has followed up a 42-goal regular season with five goals and 12 points in the playoffs. Captain Aleksander Barkov has two goals and nine points between Verhaeghe and Anthony Duclair, but the real game-changers for the Panthers are on Tkachuk’s line.

Alongside fellow pitbulls Sam Bennett and Nick Cousins, the 25-year-old has checked the opposition’s top players out of games. Tkachuk’s inability to find the net in the second round did not slow him down either; he collected five assists and a team-best +5 rating against Toronto. It is worth wondering who coach Paul Maurice will sic his most disruptive line on, though, against a team whose top three units play nearly identical minutes.

While the Barkov and Tkachuk lines are Florida’s most dangerous, shuffling Sam Reinhart (6G) and Anton Lundell (7P in 12GP) down the lineup has given Maurice plenty of options in high-leverage situations.

Even though Aaron Ekblad tied Tkachuk from the blueline to lead the Panthers in points (5) against Toronto after drawing a blank against the Bruins, Brandon Montour notched just one assist in the series after dominating Boston in Round 1. Having both power-play quarterbacks at their best would go a long way toward cracking the Hurricanes’ vaunted penalty kill.

Defense

The Hurricanes are now scoring in waves, but their identity as a team remains end-to-end defense. Outshooting their opposition as prolifically as they did during the regular season, the Hurricanes completely smothered the Devils, and, outside of an eight-goal humiliation in Game 3, they surrendered just 1.25 goals per game against New Jersey.

While two-way forwards like Martinook, Staal and Jesper Fast are often critical to Carolina’s well-documented puck possession, their top pair of Jaccob Slavin and Brent Burns has distinguished itself as an outlier on a team that prides itself on balance. Slavin leads the playoffs at +14, while Burns is tied with Necas for second on the team in power-play points (3). Together, they dominate more than 56 percent of chances, 59 percent of shots and a stunning 81 percent of goals.

Brady Skjei and Brett Pesce log similar minutes in the top four but do not mimic the statistical impact of the number 1 pair; Slavin and Burns make the Hurricanes go.

The Hurricanes’ virtually limitless defensive combos mean that if they cannot have the puck, neither can you: they have killed off an incredible 90 percent of penalties through two rounds.

The Panthers favor a wide-open game that values opportunism over sustained dominance. They have been outshot so far in these playoffs, and while that is unsurprising given their opposition, it also means that none of their defensive pairs are impressive in the metric sense.

Though Ekblad had a spotty 2022-2023 and has not been entirely healthy in ages, he returned to his dangerous best against the Maple Leafs; Gustav Forsling is a reliable presence that enables Ekblad’s offensive boldness on the top pair. Montour logs team-leading minutes after a breakout regular season (16 G, 73P), but he is not exactly a defensive bulwark. Elsewhere, Marc Staal and Radko Gudas are valued more for their physicality and veteran leadership than any numerical contributions.

If the Panthers have more talent on offense, their defensive disadvantage is just as pronounced and a porous 65.8 percent penalty kill does little to close that gap.

Goaltending

While all three Hurricanes’ goaltenders have appeared in the postseason, Frederik Andersen has laid claim to Carolina’s net. He started each of the Hurricanes’ five games against New Jersey and has a 1.80 GAA despite getting lit up for four goals in Game 3. Pyotr Kochetkov lost that contest in relief of Andersen, who is officially 5-0 during the Stanley Cup Playoffs. Though his record is inflated by Carolina’s white-hot skaters, a .931 save percentage shows that Andersen has held up his end. Antti Raanta is back from injury for this series, but given Andersen’s higher ceiling and streaking form, the former Maple Leaf will have the net until he loses it.

While it has seemed at times like anyone can start in net for the Hurricanes, make no mistake, the Panthers have relied heavily on Bobrovsky. His excellence is the series’s “X-Factor” for a reason, and the differences in shot creation between the two teams will only increase his importance to Florida. Bob could become a busy man against a team with as much zone time as Carolina. He has now started nine-straight contests, and if a game gets out of hand, Maurice will likely spare his energy and embarrassment and go to Lyon.

Injuries

Both teams could receive considerable boosts from returning players.

For Carolina, Teuvo Teravainen, arguably one of their top-three forwards, has returned to practice after having his hand broken in Game 2 against New York. If he comes back to displace either Jack Drury or Stefan Noesen on the top three lines, an already well-balanced Hurricanes forward group will be injected with some serious talent.

For Florida, scrappy bottom-six forward Ryan Lomberg could be nearing a return from a hand injury of his own that kept him out of the second round. He is thought to have had surgery but returned to team activities late last week.

Intangibles

The foremost mental aspects of the postseason are self-belief and desperation, and that is the matchup within the matchup during these Eastern Conference Final.

The Hurricanes want to win the Stanley Cup as badly as any team in the NHL. Between Paul Stastny, Burns and Staal, they have no shortage of players who know they may not get another chance to call themselves a champion. Staal won the Cup with Pittsburgh in 2009, but lifting it as captain of a team he has played more than 700 games with would mean even more.

Even the younger members of Carolina’s perennial contender will realize that the East may never be this wide-open again. Tampa Bay, Boston and Toronto are out of the running, and while the Panthers are a uniquely dangerous eighth seed, they are an eighth seed all the same. If Brind’Amour is to bring the Cup back to Raleigh, now is the time. That knowledge could lead to either total commitment, serious jitters, or some combination of the two.

On the other hand, Florida is playing without fear or pressure. They followed up their historic comeback against the Bruins with an almost equally unlikely beatdown of the Maple Leafs. The Panthers only just snuck into the playoffs and playing for their season this long has made it the norm in South Florida.

Will the Cats ride their newfound confidence straight to the Stanley Cup Final? Or do they look down and get dizzy at the final hurdle? Only time will tell.

Series Prediction

The Hurricanes have shaken off their offensive rust and are playing like they finally believe they are the team to beat in the East. Meanwhile, the Panthers’ wave of momentum has cascaded into a tsunami. Something has to give.

In a series that few will be eager to predict, the Hurricanes and Panthers will trade blows until, in a climactic showdown, Florida’s luck finally runs out against a Carolina team that makes precious few mistakes at home.

Carolina Hurricanes in seven games