TORONTO — Amid a post-season that’s seen both the Florida Panthers and the Toronto Maple Leafs wrestle with demons and ride emotional rollercoasters, much has been made of how both clubs have handled the pressure of the moment. How they’ve navigated the weight of the all-or-nothing stakes continually heaped upon them.
On one side of this second-round bout, the Maple Leafs, who swung from the euphoric swell of finally breaking their first-round curse to a miserable week that saw them reel off straight losses, sticking them in a 3-0 series hole. On the other side, these Panthers, who had to scratch and claw just to get into these playoffs, had to fight even harder to survive the first round, and now find themselves flying high, one win away from taking this Cinderella run all the way to Round 3.
After letting Toronto off the mat in Game 4 — enduring their first loss of this series, and their first dropped close-out opportunity of these playoffs — the whispers around town up North have wondered whether this match-up might be tilting. Whether these nothing-to-lose Cats might finally be feeling a bit of heat themselves, whether it might be enough to unwind this legacy-building run they’ve pieced together.
The only problem: for those in the opposing team’s locker room at Scotiabank Arena, nothing’s changed.
“I mean, we’ve been under pressure since January,” Sam Reinhart said Friday, hours before the puck dropped on Game 5, cracking a smile when asked if his club feels the pressure has shifted now that Toronto’s earned a win. “You know, we’re just day-by-day. We’ve got a 3-1 lead, and another opportunity to close it out. That fourth one’s always the most difficult.
“We’re excited about the challenge tonight.”
His head coach echoed the sentiment. While the scouting report on his team’s vibe through one-and-a-half rounds has been a club seemingly playing free and without worry, a group that’s been able to fly high by embracing the chaos and letting the chips fall where they may, Paul Maurice cautioned against overlooking all this team has been through to get to this point.
“The pressure’s real, and you want to deal with it. So, we haven’t not dealt with it,” he said Friday. “I think there’s a story that everybody’s just having fun, because I fool around with you guys up here. It hasn’t been like that this year. That’s not what this year has been — this year’s been hard.”
Fresh off the giant-slaying Round 1 comeback that saw his Panthers bounce the record-setting, Presidents’ Trophy-winning Bruins in seven games, and the dominant 3-0 lead Florida built up to start this series, it’s easy to let the details of all that came before blur together. Easy to forget the tumultuous regular season that saw Florida fail to string together more than a couple wins at a time until January, that saw them drop four straight games down the home stretch of the season, requiring a season-saving six-game win streak to get themselves back into the playoff picture.
It’s easy to forget how exactly they authored that three-game series reversal against Boston — with two do-or-die overtime wins, and one late-game comeback.
In other words, pressure is this team’s oxygen.
“Training camp was hard. And then we got into a couple months [where] the schedule was hard. And we also were grinding them pretty good,” Maurice continued. “So they’ve earned the right to be confident, based on what’s happened to them this year. Because of that, they’ve earned the right to enjoy it. The pressure’s there, but ours would be slightly different. And I’m going to leave it at that.”
Ask the players who battled through those storms and earned that right, and they credit the even-keeled Maurice as a crucial part of their journey to this point.
“Him and the staff have been so important for our success this post-season for sure,” Reinhart said of his coach’s noteworthy positivity Wednesday night in the wake of the team’s first loss to Toronto. “They’ve done a great job of kind of reeling our emotions back in, whether it’s positive or negative. I didn’t see his press conference, but I’m sure the message was pretty similar in the room yesterday and this morning.”
“He knows how to react to any situation,” added club captain Aleksander Barkov. “He’s been in the league for a long time, maybe even the longest time ever. So, he knows what to do — when we need to wake up, when we need [be] laidback, be happy.
“He knows what to do.”
Indomitable perspective aside, the Panthers know there are adjustments to be made after the Maple Leafs turned in their best defensive effort of the series to stay alive in Game 4, limiting Florida to their least-productive offensive night since the opening game of their post-season.
Key among those needed changes in Game 5 is finding a way to unlock the trio of Matthew Tkachuk, Sam Bennett and Nick Cousins, who tore Toronto up to the tune of a combined six points in Game 1, but have been held at bay in the three games since.
“They’ve made some adjustments — I think it’s more so about us,” Cousins said ahead of Game 5. “Just as a line, we’ve got to get in on the forecheck more, myself included. We’ve got to move our feet a little bit more, make their D turn and create a little bit more offensive zone time. That’s usually when we’re at our best.”
His coach agreed, but diagnosed that Panthers’ wrecking ball line as having suffered the same affliction the rest of the team did in Wednesday’s loss.
“I found them fine. If I didn’t like their line last game, I would attribute that to all four having the same kind of thing going on,” Maurice said. “I thought we played with the puck too much while our feet were standing still. That’s the simple version of what I saw from the bench, and certainly when I watched the game again. Those guys are better when Benny’s rolling through the middle, and they’re on the puck, with their feet first.
“When they get it, they don’t need a map. The net never moves. They know where it is.”
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