The Florida Panthers Are All About The Weird Sweeps
Last year, they suffered through one. This year, they could inflict it.
One thing you can say about the Florida Panthers as a franchise: They’re never predictable.
Back before the Vegas Golden Knights and Seattle Kraken blew up the curve for expansion teams, Florida was the model for early NHL team success — nearly going .500 in Year 1 (33-34-17) and Year 2 (20-22-6), then making it all the way to the Stanley Cup Final in Year 3. So naturally, they wouldn’t win another playoff series for the next 24 seasons, despite the presence of some truly great talent (Roberto Luongo, Pavel Bure, Olli Jokinen, Tomas Vokoun, etc).
When Florida did finally start building a real winner around its core of Jonathan Huberdeau, Aleksander Barkov and Aaron Ekblad, the turnaround was equally stunning. The Panthers had the league’s fourth-best record in 2020-21, and won the President’s Trophy — given to the league’s top regular-season team — in 2021-22 on the strength of an all-time Top-20 NHL offense (relative to league average). But that was just the setup for an all-time letdown when the Tampa Bay Lightning swept Florida out of the postseason’s second round in 2022.
So naturally, they followed that up with a disappointing regular season… and then, most likely (with a 92% probability), another incredible run to the Stanley Cup Final — possibly capped off with a shocking sweep of a different rival.
Yes, hockey is a deeply weird sport sometimes!
If the Panthers do end up sweeping the Carolina Hurricanes tonight, Florida will have been both the recipient and the perpetrator of two historically surprising series sweeps, in back-to-back seasons. According to regular-season winning percentage, the 2021-22 Panthers were the fifth-best team ever to be swept 4-0, while the 2022-23 Hurricanes would rank 17th on the list if they lose again.
Furthermore, the Panthers’ regular-season winning percentage differentials tell the story of two remarkable upsets. In 2021-22, Florida had an 85-point edge in winning percentage over Tampa Bay, only to be swept. After accounting for the NHL’s historical home-ice advantage of +5% in the playoffs, the odds of a .622 W% underdog sweeping a .707 W% favorite are just 2.64%. And in 2022-23, the odds of a .512 W% underdog like the Panthers sweeping a .634 W% favorite like the Hurricanes — with a 122-point gap in winning percentage — are even longer, at 1.99%. Clearly, the odds of seeing the same team involved in both sweeps in back-to-back playoffs, once as a loser and once as a winner, are extremely remote.
But there’s at least some tradition of this happening in hockey’s postseason — most recently from a fellow Florida team.
The Lightning were the victims of a 0.8%-probability sweep against the Columbus Blue Jackets in 2019, then turned around and made the list as a victor three seasons later when they beat the Panthers in 2022. The Detroit Red Wings did those Lightning one better, getting improbably swept by the New Jersey Devils in the 1995 Final and then doing their own sweep of the Philadelphia Flyers two years later, in the 1997 Final. And for true narrative whiplash, see the 2020-21 Winnipeg Jets: Pulling off an improbable sweep of the better-seeded Edmonton Oilers in Round 1, only to fall to the sub-.500 Montreal Canadiens in a sweep the very next round.
The Panthers still have work to do in order to finish off the sweep against Carolina, and it remains hard to believe that Sergei Bobrovsky and Florida’s normally shaky defense have allowed just 3 total goals in the series so far. But the Panthers’ destiny seems to be to always surprise us — whether that means getting swept as a big favorite or doing the sweeping as an even bigger underdog.
Filed under: NHL