Sonny Sachdeva @sachdevasonny – TSN the top source for sports in Canada.
To get a sense of just how pivotal the first-round bout between the Atlantic Division’s second- and third-best squads could be, consider this: for the past half-decade, the road to the Stanley Cup has run through Florida.
Five straight Cup Finals, five straight appearances from either the Florida Panthers or the Tampa Bay Lightning. The last time the post-season’s final round didn’t feature one of the two Floridian squads, Lil Nas X’s ‘Old Town Road’ was still lighting up the Billboard Hot 100. Avengers: Endgame was just touching down in theatres. So, while we’ve seen plenty of it over the past few years, recent history suggests the stakes remain sky high for the 2025 iteration of the Sunshine State’s rivalry round.
Of course, much has changed over the course of those five years of Floridian Cup-hunting. After three straight seasons of watching the Bolts march to the Final — two of which ended in banners and rings for Victor Hedman and Co. — the Panthers grabbed the wheel and took over in 2023, authoring two Cup Final runs of their own. Now, after reaching the summit in 2024, they head into the 2025 playoffs not as an underdog, not as a hopeful, but as the defending champs.
But the paths the two clubs have taken this season suggests another reversal might be coming.
In the wake of their championship run, the Panthers have been on a rollercoaster. Free agency plucked a few key names off the roster, injuries claimed a couple more, and other unforeseen plot twists — like the PED violation that earned Aaron Ekblad a 20-game ban — sapped even more stability from the campaign. The result is a Panthers squad that doesn’t seem to be rolling quite as smoothly as the one that lifted the Cup last June. Still, the key leaders are all wearing Panthers colours, and they know the real games begin next week.
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And then there’s the Bolts. The fall from grace seemed swift for the perennial finalists, Tampa Bay losing the 2022 Cup to Colorado and then getting bounced in the first round in each of the next two years, each time by a club they’d previously walked over. Then came some tough decisions, none more ruthless than the organization moving on from longtime captain Steven Stamkos. Brutal as their rapid retool might’ve been, the Bolts now find themselves back among the league’s elite after a brief spell in the wild-card race.
With no shortage of big-game experience between the two clubs and their all-world leaders, which Floridian outfit books a ticket to the second round, and perhaps beyond?
Head-to-head record
Panthers: 2-2-0
Lightning: 2-2-0
The breakdown
The Cats are going to have their hands full with this version of the Lightning. After a middling 2023-24, the Bolts have returned to their former place as one of the league’s most dangerous outfits — they enter the post-season with the NHL’s most prolific offence, and they’ve been no less elite on the defensive side, namely due to their future Hall of Fame netminder rediscovering his elite form.
The Panthers’ regular season has been more a mixed bag. They finished middle-of-the-pack offensively and were a top-10 club defensively, but the numbers don’t tell us all that much about what this group really is. Much of their regular season was navigated without vital members of their squad in the lineup. And after two straight trips to the Final, this Florida core needs no lessons about what’s required when regular-season hockey gives way to the playoff grind. Paul Maurice’s side has cemented their identity over the course of the past two years, and regardless of their regular-season performance, you wonder if they’ll show up in Game 1 as that familiar, relentless behemoth from last year’s Cup run.
If there is a thorn in the side of Florida’s hopes of going back-to-back, it might simply be health. As dangerous as the Cats are, they aren’t the same club without Matthew Tkachuk doing what he does best. The 27-year-old has suggested he expects to be back for Game 1 of the first round — still, he hasn’t suited up for his club since early February. How he looks upon his return, how quickly he can get back up to speed, and whether he can get the Panthers offence rolling at the level it’s shown over the past few post-seasons will be crucial.
Tampa Bay is in the opposite boat. They head into Round 1 with a devastatingly deep group — Nikita Kucherov is fresh off his second straight Art Ross-winning campaign, Brayden Point has turned in another elite season beside him, Jake Guentzel has put up perhaps his finest season in his first turn as a Bolt, Brandon Hagel has evolved from quality depth piece to elite scorer, and Victor Hedman has risen back to fringes of the Norris conversation at 34 years old.
But the most important performance from any member of the Lightning this season undoubtedly came from the man in the cage. After putting up some of the worst numbers of his career in 2023-24, Andre Vasilevskiy bounced back with a vintage effort in 2024-25, his .921 save percentage the best he’s posted in four years, and the third-best mark he’s ever put up.
Florida has its own quality veteran in the cage, of course, and both Vasilevskiy and Sergei Bobrovsky have proven able to come up with a game-changing, series-altering moment when it’s needed most. With all the firepower housed in each lineup, it might just come down to which netminder outshines the other.
Advanced stats
(5-on-5 totals from Natural Stat Trick)
