I decided to take on the painful and re-traumatizing task of rewatching every Panthers goal from last season's Eastern Conference Finals to better understand exactly how they beat us, and what we might need to change or improve on to beat them (or a similar tough opponent) in the playoffs this year. The table shows how each goal happened and who was responsible.

Here is what I learned:

  1. Goaltending was not the problem. The vast majority of Florida's goals were impossible to expect any goalkeeper to defend. Freddie and Pyotr didn't really let in any soft goals, they were put in bad positions by defensive mistakes.
  2. Bad defense by defensemen was the problem. Orlov was directly responsible for 11 of Florida’s 21 goals scored. Morrow was responsible for 5. The good news is this means that 76% of Florida's goals scored were due to miscues by players no longer with the Canes. Our forwards were generally excellent defensively.
  3. Depth matters. Remember that due to injuries Chatfield missed the entire series and Walker missed Games 3-5, forcing us to play two rookies (Morrow and Nikishin) and forcing Orlov to play his off-side. The injuries to Chatfield and Walker had a substantial impact on this series, which I believe might have felt close to equal if we were at full strength.
  4. We have to own the front of the net on defense (and offense). 16 of Florida's 21 goals (76%) came from directly in front of the net. Deflections while screening the goalie, tap-in shots to open nets, point-blank snipes…when they beat us to the netfront, they made us pay. We simply cannot let them get open in these areas, whether on the rush, camping out for a tip, or after getting in behind the net. On offense, our players need to be willing to go to these areas and fight for position and control.

Overall, I think our team was better than the scoreboard and outcome reflected. When fully healthy (knock on wood), we should be able to compete with any team in the NHL. With the meaningful offseason additions we made, the continued growth of key young players, and the buy-in of the whole group wanting to be here, I'm optimistic about the season ahead. LGC!

6 comments

  2. being healthy makes a huge difference in being able to make it far. each of the last few years there have been key players injured which has made it much harder to win games against teams that were able to abuse LTIR while the Canes haven’t

  3. Agree with pretty much everything here. So many shots went in that were re directs or just horrible defensive plays by Orlov. Of course he can’t take 100% of the blame though.

    People forget how incredible Freddie was during the post season.

  4. It really can’t be overstated how big losing Chatfield was. Morrow basically single-handedly lost us that Game 1, and he played better after that, but the damage was done, especially with Orlov having the worst two games as a Canes defenseman we’ve seen in a while in games 2 and 3. It’s not a coincidence that the person replacing Chatfield and Chatfield’s defensive partner were the two biggest culprits for the defense being as bad as it was. To that point, depth is definitely something for us to address — while injury luck is always favorable to some teams in the playoffs, we can’t just bank on our 6 main defensemen always being ready.

  5. As a finance/data person, I fucking LOVE what you did here. Collected data, analyzed it and made suggestions off of it.

    10/10 post.

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