The Florida Panthers, as terrifying a hockey team as they are, have made a bit of a habit out of elongating their playoff series. Take their slow start in Toronto last round, or the three they lost while up 3-0 to the Oilers last Stanley Cup Final. In all likelihood, their shutout loss on Monday night will be just another snooze button. But after a trio of wins in the Eastern Conference Final where the Panthers used the Hurricanes like a bonfire does newspaper, the Canes earned at least one victory to hang their helmets on. If nothing else from this series goes Carolina's way—and so far, it hasn't—they'll at least have the excellent stretch of hockey that eventually delivered the game-winner in Game 4.
This action was tense until a pair of empty-netters carried the Hurricanes to a 3-0 final. But Carolina did a spectacular job limiting the defending champions' chances on net. Keeping the ice tilted has been the team's personal path to victory year after year, but against the fury, physicality, and plain old talent of Florida, the Canes shrunk into something unrecognizable as they lost three games by a combined score of 16-4. Here, however, the team out-efforted the Pants, particularly from the midpoint of the first period through a Carolina penalty late in the second. In that time, Florida produced absolutely nothing of note on offense and relied on Sergei Bobrovsky to be tidy in goal. At 0-0 with the clincher in sight, Florida might still have felt fairly comfortable, but it was Logan Stankoven who ensured that his Hurricanes' momentum would not go wasted.
As Carolina worked the puck out of their zone, a pass up ice was deflected backward by an enemy Panther. But instead of a change of possession, Alexander Nikishin hustled across the ice to pick up the puck, and he flipped it diagonally across center to Stankoven, whose defender let him slip during the neutral-zone looseness. Stankoven had a wide-open lane to Bobrovsky, and he took his shot decisively, beating the goalie on his near-side blocker. Frederik Andersen, back from a benching, protected the lead from there.
Stankoven's goal gave the Hurricanes their best postseason showing since they won the Stanley Cup in '06. In three conference finals they've reached since, the most recent against Florida in 2023, the Canes got swept each time. Again and again in the Rod Brind'Amour era, the team's consistent and extremely respectable regular season has withered when they've had to play the postseason's hottest clubs. Is there shame in that? Not necessarily. (Toronto, for example, would kill to win two series.) But it's getting frustrating for a group that was once scrappy upstarts. Their best players are simply not as good as the other teams' best players, and even when Carolina tried to remedy that weakness by trading for a stud in Mikko Rantanen, the marriage quickly failed and they had to ship him to Dallas for the far less established 22-year-old Stankoven.
It still feels bad to be down 3-1, yes. But this is the point of desperation where a team has to rely on the wisdom of old clichés—specifically, one game at a time. This version of the Hurricanes had never beaten a foe as locked in as the Panthers in a round this late. Now they have. All they can do in the next 60 minutes is try to win another.
