When Paul Maurice was hired out of retirement to heal the Florida Panthers' multitude of competitive leprosies, he was called in some corners "the enemy of fun." This happened because of the way he likes to play—simple, direct, minimizing open-ice flair, and emphasizing all things heavy. He is not a brutish tactician, but he recognized, without ever having the CV to prove it, that winning in April, May, and June requires a devotion to power, persistence, and crowd control in front of the net that hockey’s regular-season dilettantes never seem to fully grasp.
But, and we're being fair here, Maurice is indeed also the enemy of fun. We can say this because the Panthers' Eastern Conference Final series against the Carolina Hurricanes is already deeply and profoundly un-fun, in the classic only-one-team-is-getting-its-way way. Beating the 'Canes on Thursday night by the frankly rude score of 5-0 was lopsided enough, but other than an offside call that negated Carolina's only real chance of the night, that score was actually a kindness. Put another way, through the first 40 minutes, the only two differences between the 'Canes and Angel Reese were a) there were 17 more of them than her, and b) she got off more shots.
This series has indeed been the most profound of mismatches; only Oklahoma City-Memphis in the first round of the NBA Western Conference’s early rout-o-rama phase really compares, and Memphis had the excuse of being an injury-thinned eight-seed that more or less deserved what they had coming. Carolina, on the other hand, is a persistent upper-echelon team and playing in a conference final. We mention this because you wouldn’t know it from having watched; they have never fully gotten a handle on this series. The Game 1 box score and ancillary metrics looked closer than the game actually felt, but Game 2 was a full-spectrum beatdown that seemed to indicate that there will be another on Saturday, and then a fourth Monday, and nothing more.
Not that Carolina should be surprised entirely; neither should you, for that matter. They have now lost each of their last 14 conference final games, having been swept in 2009 (by Pittsburgh), 2019 (by Boston) and 2023 (by Florida). The commonality in all of those walkovers is that they couldn't score. Last night, though, the Hurricanes couldn't even shoot enough to make scoring a legitimate notion. They finished with 17 shots, 10 of which came in the third period, when the game had already been logged by the coroner and the paperwork fired. The desperate ones weren’t any more threatening than the few that preceded them.
Florida, on the other hand, has only gotten better as the playoffs have continued. Since losing the first two games to Toronto in a series that went so well that the Leafs just fired Brendan Shanahan, their club president of 11 years, the Panthers have won six of seven by an aggregate score of 29-8; they are now 22-10 on the road during the last three postseasons. In short, their game translates in all ports of call, because it isn't predicated on having the last change or any of the other accoutrements of home. It's just a modified version of what Oklahoma City is doing to the NBA—a flat assertion to the effect of "We do what we want, and if we can't, we make sure you can't either." Then comes the brutal work of proving it.
If you're looking for taut, tense games with goalie acrobatics and Ed Olczyk expelling his larynx completely out of his mouth on a mid-ice hit, you're pretty much spitting up a rope. The last four games have pretty well sealed that part of the deal. Florida wins games the way a certain type of snake eats: patiently and mercilessly, and then wholly and comprehensively. Maybe Paul Maurice is not the enemy of fun after all—he's just the enemy of your fun. The Panthers, for their part, are having a blast.
