Breakfast Salvos: Get ready for your favorite team to learn all the wrong lessons from Florida's win

(Unless Florida is your favorite team.)

Congratulations to the Florida Panthers. Again.

Finally, a prediction I got right. Granted, there’s nothing special about predicting the inevitable. The Oilers pushed back in small doses, and that was the problem. Small doses of good can’t beat constant doses of great. Edmonton is still the team to beat in the West, and yet Florida made it look easy. And painful. Three seasons. Three Cup Finals appearances. Two Cups. Hockey GMs are going to respond this like totally normal people, right?

Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe Florida is just too good for other teams to be under any illusion that they can be them. James Mirtle wrote about how the Panthers stacked up to the best teams in the salary cap era. Then he got it wrong by ranking them. Because, no. Just no. The Lightning’s run was epic. Nothing will ever be taken from that team. But the Panthers doing it with full schedules against an elite team twice in a row as opposed to two Cinderella teams that wouldn’t even make the playoffs the following season gives Florida the clear edge. This is the best team of the salary cap era. No GM or team should be under any illusion that they can be the Panthers.

That doesn’t mean there isn’t a blueprint for various lessons to be learned. We’ll get to that. For now, hockey celebrates the second championship of a well-run team that is ahead of the curve for all the reasons that are worth celebrating.

Gritensity: Au Naturel

Your team doesn’t need to get tougher. It needs to get better.

I get that hockey still has more Stan Fischlers in their front office than they have Sunny Mehtas, but still. This kind of talking point is for front offices that think non-hockey reasons can explain their on-ice hockey flaws. This is not to say that Florida doesn’t have a special brand of hockey that is half Kristi Yamaguchi, half Wesley Snipes. They do. The Panthers are bastards.

But here’s the thing your team doesn’t understand. If your best players aren’t bastards, then your team won’t be either. Sam Bennett, Matthew Tkachuk, etc. When your ice time leaders play like that, opponents feel it, each and every one of their many shifts. That’s very different than Ryan Reaves trying to pick a fight with some fourth liner for five minutes a night who never even sees the ice with the opposing star player to begin with. Now if Auston Matthews were doing that, you’d get the picture. Toughness needs to be as inherent as it is explicit.

If toughness doesn’t show up on the scoresheet, then it’s not toughness. It’s just ego.

Buying players versus buying value

Every year there’s a bad contract that gets handed out. Seattle with Chandler Stephenson. Colorado with Miles Wood. Columbus with Damon Severson and Erik Gudbranson. Edmonton — mostly everything Stan Bowman has recently signed, basically. And every year we hear about taxes.

The Florida difference is many things, but one big piece is that this is not a team obsessed with resumes. This is what most teams do. They sign or trade for a player who used to be good, paying them for who they once were rather than who they are now. Or they extend productive players thinking that production can’t be replaced. Eetu Luostarinen, Evan Rodrigues, Niko Mikkola — three players making less than nine million in combined cap. Their worth? Four extra points in the standings per Evolving-Hockey’s WAR model.

This is why the Panthers didn’t skip a beat when they lost Anthony DuClair, Brandon Montour, and Radko Gudas. Keep in mind, Montour led their defenders in icetime in the 22-23 season. Your favorite team is probably worrying about who can replace the minutes they lost instead of adding value where it can.

Possession, not defense, wins championships

Defense doesn’t win championships. Great teams do.

Florida’s a great team. And their success kind of undercuts the old (and wrong) cliche about how defense wins championships — as if the best teams are static rather than dynamic, fluid instead of binary. Florida had six players with more than 20 points this postseason, which was tied for the most of any playoff team in history. They were the second team in history to have three players score five or more goals in a Cup Final. They spent more time with a lead than any team in Cup history. This was pure Cobra Kai. They struck first. And they struck often.

This is not a team that sat back and blocked shots when the puck was in their zone. They attacked. Constantly. Hockey is a game of territory. If you’re not winning it, then it doesn’t matter how good your offense or defense is¹.

Hydras, not rattlesnakes

Imagine your favorite team — a playoff bound team — trades for Brad Marchand. I’d bet good money they decide to put him on their top line or next to the biggest names. When it comes to fancy stats, there is little that is understood about chemistry as an on-ice tangible instead of just a buzzword. Ryan Stimson and Louis Boulet are the only names to my knowledge who have invested in understanding the distinction between chemistry and interlinking skills. I don’t know what kind of database Sunny Mehta has, but somebody needs to pull an Ocean’s Eleven on that front office.

Consider the vaunted third line. Before the playoffs started, I don’t think it was on anybody’s radar. But consider the difference. Anton Lundell went from a 45-point player to a 64-point player based on postseason point pace. Eetu Luostarinen went from a 24-point player to a 67-point player. And Brad Marchand went from 51 regular season points to a 70-point player in the playoffs. One player shooting hot is an anomaly. But all three?

Value is not just what a player can add or subtract from shift to shift. It’s also about the value between them, and what that in and of itself can add from shift to shift. Whatever’s going on here, the principle holds true: hydras, not rattlesnakes.

Forging your own identity

A lot is always said about the NHL being a copycat league. It’s the losers who are copycats.

The Panthers didn’t magically become built for playoff hockey. The pieces were already there. When they lost for the second time to the Lightning in 2022, Aleksander Barkov, Sam Bennett, Sam Reinhart, Gustav Forsling, Aaron Ekblad, and Sergei Bobrovsky were all a part of that team. Were they not built for playoff hockey then? Where was this narrative at the time? Hindsight is not analysis.

The way the Panthers are discussed, you would think they were the first team to ever win a Cup. Chances are, there are really good teams that have all the pieces they need to win a Cup. The bulk of Florida’s team was built by free agency (Carter Verhaeghe, Evan Rodrigues, Niko Mikkola, etc) and trade (Seth Jones, Brad Marchand, etc). Only three of their players were drafted. Most teams won’t be able to build like this.

I know it’s cheesy, but a team can only aspire to be the best version of itself rather than adopt an identity that’s not their own.

“You have to carry a big basket to bring something home.”

I don’t remember who said this, but I got it from David Epstein’s Range. Good book.

It can mean a lot of things, but you get the idea. GM Bill Zito is clearly open-minded. How many GMs can you imagine looking as enchanted by a discussion about data at this Analytics Conference in 2019 as Zito does here? It’s easy to see why Florida’s analytics team — specifically Sunny Mehta — is such a crucial part of their decision-making process per Jeff Marek (starts at the 25-minute mark).

This is not about Analytics vs. The Eye Test. It’s about respecting what you don’t know more than what you do. John Matisz wrote a great piece about the value Florida places in their pro scouting, and the difference between them and other teams.

Florida has a big enough basket to hold two Cups. Given the way they run things, they could very well make room for more.

1. Best possession teams over the last three seasons? Carolina, Florida, and Edmonton. In that order.