The Toronto Maple Leafs start their play-in series this weekend, along with 15 other teams.
On Sunday, we will finally get to see the Toronto Maple Leafs in action, as they will begin their series vs the Columbus Blue Jackets.
Yesterday we looked at the #11 and 12 seeds in their respective conferences.
Those four teams do not look like strong bets to get very far.
For today’s breakdown, we move up the standings to the #9 and 10 seeds in the East and West to see how they look heading into the Qualifiers. Statistics are courtesy of Hockey Reference.
A Look at the Competition
(10) Florida Panthers
The Panthers finished the regular season with 78 points in 69 games played. They ranked 6th in the NHL with 228 goals for, while allowing 224 goals – 5th worst in the league.
They have a stable power play that scored 21.3% of the time, good for tenth in the NHL. Florida’s penalty kill was suspect at best, finishing 20th in the league. The Panthers are slightly below league average in most puck possession metrics.
Jonathan Huberdeau led a balanced scoring attack, notching 78 points while playing all 69 games for the Panthers. Behind him, Florida throws Aleksander Barkov, Mike Hoffman and Evgenii Dadonov at you, all of whom recorded 45 points or more this season.
The defense is a bit of a mess. While Keith Yandle and Aaron Ekblad provided substantial offense for the team, the back end as a whole was quite soft. Their second pairing of Riley Stillman and Anton Stralman ranked 27th in the league among defensive twos, according to Daily Faceoff.
The Panthers backed up the Brinks truck for goaltender Sergei Bobrovsky in the offseason, paying him $70 million over seven years to be their number one goalie. So far, it has not paid off. Bob recorded a 3.23 GAA and a .900 SV% this season. He will need to be much better if the Panthers have any desire to get to the playoffs. (stats naturalstattrick.com).
There is nothing that really wows me about this team and their play-in series against the Islanders is likely the least exciting of the eight matchups. They do have Head Coach Joel Quenneville, who, of course, guided the Chicago Blackhawks to 3 Stanley Cups in six years.