Lazerus: The Panthers are rewriting playoff hockey history by having fun

SUNRISE, Fla. The Stanley Cup playoffs can be painful. The tension and pressure are unrelenting and your mind can’t wander freely for up to two months at a time. The physical demands are unfathomable, your battered body is crying out for the sleep it won’t let you get. It is a battle of attrition and a test of will. How badly do you want your name on that silver plate? How much are you willing to endure?

It’s playoff hockey. Pain. Suffering. Sacrifice. Nice pain.

What is the problem with Matthew Tkachuks?

Throughout these playoffs, the Florida Panthers star is smiling. He smiles in the team photos on the scoreboard, where everyone was supposed to look mean and cheeky. He smiles amid the shouts after the whistle, laughs at the face wash and grins through the checks he gives and his own. He smiles during his interaction with reporters. And he’s sure to be smiling as he bursts out the door and throws his now patented Bus in 10 party after scoring overtime wins.

These guys here are having a good time. During the playoffs! Is that even allowed? Maybe everyone was right when they tried to paint him as the villain of these playoffs. How dare he.

Why play if you can’t have fun? he said before Game 3 of Monday’s Eastern Conference finals. Enjoyed every minute. Bantering in the locker room before overtime, skating games, just being able to be together and continue to be together for a month and change after some teams have been out, having fun right now, just having fun every day on the court.

No no no, No. This is not how it works, sir. You’re supposed to speak in military clichés and occasionally contort dramatically and use the grind nine times in a five-minute rant, no fun. This is war. This is history. This is a legacy. Ice hockey is not like that game.

But to watch these Florida Panthers happily skip through this season, you’d think this would be easy. They’re certainly starting to look that way. They won three straight playoff games, knocking off the best regular season team in NHL history, the Boston Bruins. They sent the Maple Leafs into a new era with a gentlemanly sweep. And now they’re coming off their first Stanley Cup Final since 1996 with a painful 1-0 victory over the Carolina Hurricanes, which they did mostly without their captain and No. 1 center Aleksander Barkov, who left the game in the first period. with a lower body injury.

He’s at his bar mitzvah, Panthers coach Paul Maurice joked. Just kidding! About his star player being injured! In the playoffs! Can he make that? Is it interruptible?

Once again there was Tkachuk smiling away. There was Radko Gudas, slyly straightening his handlebar mustache whenever a new camera landed in his cubicle. The Panthers screamed and screamed, their cheers echoing inside the FLA Live Arena after their seventh straight one-goal game was once again turned upside down. There were 19,873 fans in attendance who drove to a ridiculous climax to watch the Miami Heat and Florida Panthers, a pair of bottom-of-the-pack conference and finals back-to-back wins for six straight nights, both teams feeding off each other, wearing each other’s gear in practice, and sending the South off. From Florida, giddiness.

It turns out that winning is fun. Pursuing a lifelong dream is fun. Playing sports with friends is fun.

Who knew?

Radko Gudas (Bruce Bennett/Getty Images)

Apparently Paul Maurice knew. He immediately got the impression that this team was a little different, a little lighter and looser than most, playing players in the summer when he got the job. It was just something about how they talked about the team, about how they talked about their teammates. And even at their lowest point this season, when the playoffs seemed the furthest away, they never let frustration seep into their souls. A well-timed Ryan Lomberg rip or Tkachuk tweet could ease the tension even in a quadruple overtime playoff game.

When you get to the final four, everyone has a great room, everyone loves each other, everything is cool, right? Maurice said. Everyone has fun. But I would say that was also true in our November and December. It was very difficult here. They still got along and still found a way to have fun. We just found a way to play really hard and have fun at the same time. So you can enjoy the moment.

Down the hall at FLA Live Arena, before and after Game 3, the Carolina Hurricanes lived up to the long-established norms of hockey society: They looked miserable. There’s a difference of a few bounces, so it’s easy to be explosive when you’re 3-0 up, it’s inappropriate to be chipper and chirpy when you’re 3-0 down. Three games. Three one-goal losses. Nothing to smile about there.

The Hurricanes have been very serious in all series. Rod BrindAmours’ media sessions have gotten shorter and shorter because there are only so many ways to say, “We can’t score on Sergei Bobrovsky and it’s really annoying.” Carolina was the better team in the bigs in the first three games of this series and has nothing to show for it. That’s partly because the Hurricanes, as good as they are, as deep as they are, as structured and disciplined as they are, just don’t have a roster full of contributors, especially without the injured Max Pacioretty and Andrei Svechnikov. But that’s mostly because Bobrovsky is in the prime of his life, with a streak of 132 saves on 135 shots.

There’s nothing funny about that.

Tkachuk said Monday that the playoffs are like Groundhog Day, but he said the good thing is that you get to see your guys and play hockey day in and day out. But much of the film was about the personal hell that Bill Murray’s character was in, forced to relive the same miserable day over and over until he was able to change his fate. Carolinas stuck in a time loop, it can’t get out of Bob’s description, Bob stops them, repeat.

You definitely hate losing, Hurricanes forward Teuvo Teravainen said. The games have been close. It could have gone either way. It is frustrating.

If the Panthers were down 3-0, would they be as loose and free and easy as they are now? Would they still find jokes and enjoy their time together at the trough? We may never know because Bobrovsky may never give up a goal again. But things were bleak at Christmas as well, with the Panthers below .500 after the Presidents Trophy season. That’s when Maurice knew he had something special here, something different.

One goal game? A mandatory situation? Injured superstar? Don’t bother bothering these guys, nothing even stresses them out.

We enjoyed it, said Gudas, who called Barkov the best player in the world. A tight game is always fun to play. After Christmas we had to play those games quite a lot from January onwards. Not really anything new for us.

However, it is something new for hockey. This is a team that wouldn’t have even made the playoffs had the Pittsburgh Penguins not somehow lost to the Chicago Blackhawks in Pittsburgh, in a must-win game in the final week of the season, no less. And here they are, on the verge of shedding their third consecutive eternal power.

And they do it with a smile on their face.

How could you work your whole life to get to a place you didn’t enjoy being in? Maurice said. What the hell was the point of that?

Nerve.

(Top photo: Matthew Tkachuk and Sergei Bobrovsky)