Winning in the Stanley Cup playoffs and becoming a championship-capable team, Tampa Bay coach Jon Cooper said, is an art. It's something that has to be learned.
Turns out, the Lightning were good teachers.
And the Florida Panthers were really good students.
The Lightning, unbeknownst to them at the time, planted the seeds for this run of postseason by their cross-state rival Panthers. Tampa Bay swept Florida in the second round of the 2022 playoffs, simply dominating the series. It forced the Panthers to make sweeping changes. And Florida has taken over as state champions ever since.
The Panthers own the Sunshine State hockey world yet again, finishing off a five-game, first-round ousting of the Lightning for a second consecutive season on Wednesday night.
“Whether they swept us or it was 4-1 or 4-2, to me that's kind of irrelevant,” Cooper said. “They beat us. ... We've been the rep in the Stanley Cup Final the last five years. It was our turn for a while. Now it's theirs.”
Next up for Florida: either Toronto or Ottawa in Round 2
“It’s not easy. Every game was tight,” said Florida forward Eetu Luostarinen, who had a goal and three assists in Wednesday's 6-3 victory in Game 5 that clinched the series in Tampa. “But we’ll enjoy this a little bit and then focus on the next one.”
The state that hardly ever experiences winter has become an absolute hockey juggernaut, with the pendulum now having fully swung the Panthers' way. Tampa Bay won the Cup in 2020 and 2021, then played for it again in 2022 — the year they swept the Panthers with ease. Florida played for the Cup in 2023, won it in 2024 and is now one round closer to getting there again this year.
Over those six seasons, including playoffs, Florida owns the third-best winning percentage in the NHL, a smidge better than fourth-place Tampa Bay. It is a spectacular rivalry, certainly one of the best in the sport right now.
“I would buy season tickets for the four games that’ll get played next year on that alone,” Panthers coach Paul Maurice said.
Cooper knows what the Panthers said after the 2022 sweep against his team: They had to learn to beat them. A year later, Florida trailed Boston — the best team in the NHL regular season that season — 3-1 in Round 1, then rallied and ousted the Bruins in seven games. They were on their way.
“They built a team. They got a sniff of it. They went to the final. Didn’t win. Came back, went to the final and won,” Cooper said. “And who knows what they’re going to do this year. They’re primarily the same team but now they know how to do it and there’s only a few teams in the last little while that really know how to do it. We were one of them. And now they’re one of them.”
Florida has now made the second round in four consecutive seasons, a complete turnaround from the once-moribund days of the franchise — which went to the second round exactly once in its first 27 seasons. The team went more than a quarter-century without a playoff series win, only to now have won more playoff games over the last four years than any other club.
The lessons were learned. And the Panthers can only hope the ride continues.
“Obviously, we're doing some things right," Panthers captain Aleksander Barkov said.
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AP NHL playoffs: https://apnews.com/hub/stanley-cup and https://apnews.com/hub/nhl
Tim Reynolds, The Associated Press
