Everyone Has Florida Back in the Top Five. The Panthers Spent the Summer Fixing the Half of the Rink That Was Going to Fix Itself.

The consensus on the Florida Panthers has hardened into something close to a slogan: they did not decline, they got hurt, and now they are healthy and have both Tkachuks. Most of that is true. Aleksander Barkov missed the entire season after knee surgery, Matthew Tkachuk missed the first 47 games, and the team that finished with 84 points and outside the playoffs was never the team that won two Cups. Then Bill Zito traded the ninth and 25th picks, a conditional 2029 first and a 2027 second for Brady Tkachuk, and the preview magazines moved Florida straight back into the top five. Here is the problem with the slogan. Florida's offence was always going to come back; Barkov's knee saw to that. What sank the Panthers was the other end of the ice, and the summer's answer to that was to replace the 58th-ranked goaltender in the league with the 57th.

What actually broke

Start with the part the health narrative gets right, because it matters for what follows. Per MoneyPuck, Florida generated 265.2 expected goals across all situations and scored 246, a finishing shortfall of 19 goals, seventh-worst in the league. That is what a season without Barkov and with a half-season of Tkachuk looks like: the chances were still there, and the hands to convert them were on the injured list. Put Barkov back at centre, give Matthew Tkachuk 75 games, add a brother who scored 22 goals in 60 for Ottawa, and that minus-19 does not just close; it likely flips. The August argument that Florida got hurt rather than old was right about the offence.

It was not right about everything. Florida allowed 274 goals against 265.2 expected, so the goaltending cost them about nine, and the 265 itself was the 11th-highest expected goals against in the league. At five-on-five the Panthers ranked 21st in expected goals against per 60 and 27th in high-danger shots against per 60, at 2.69 an hour against a league average of 2.37. The 2024 champions were a team that let you have the perimeter and nothing else. The 2026 Panthers let you into the slot more often than every team but five.

That is the number the summer needed to address, and it is a skater number, not a goalie number. Gustav Forsling and Aaron Ekblad, the pair that anchored two Cup runs, finished at 52 and 50 percent expected-goal shares at five-on-five, with Ekblad conceding 2.62 expected goals per 60 on his ice. Seth Jones was at 50 and 2.58. Nobody on the blue line was bad; nobody was the wall the Panthers used to have either. The additions to that group were Radko Gudas, 36, and Alex Petrovic, 34, both returning Panthers, both depth. Every dollar of premium capital went to a winger.

The crease swap, side by side

Which brings us to the move everyone has treated as a footnote. Sergei Bobrovsky left for Toronto on July 1, where he is being asked to fix a problem the coach was hired to solve, and Florida's replacement was Jacob Markstrom, acquired from New Jersey the day before for Evan Rodrigues, Jesper Boqvist and Ben Steeves. The two goaltenders' 2025-26 seasons are close enough that you could swap the names and not many people would notice.

Markstrom is two years younger, which is worth something, and he arrives on the two-year, $12 million extension he signed with New Jersey last November, a $6 million cap hit against Bobrovsky's $7 million in Toronto. He also did his damage behind an ordinary New Jersey structure rather than a broken one. But he saved 11.9 fewer goals than expected on a .883, one spot above the man he replaces, and the seven-season shape of his career is the same sawtooth Bobrovsky's is.

Two seasons well above the league, two well below, three within a point of average. Markstrom at his best, the 2021-22 Vezina finalist in Calgary, was 13 points better than the league, worth roughly 15 goals over a Florida-sized workload. Markstrom at his worst, in 2022-23 and again last year, is exactly what Florida just got rid of. The median outcome is a goaltender at the league average, which is a real upgrade on .877 and no upgrade at all on what the Cup teams had.

The backup is the more interesting bet. Akira Schmid, 26, came from Vegas for a 2028 third-round pick after a .893 and 1.0 goals below expected in 34 games. That looks unremarkable until you notice where he did it: the Golden Knights allowed 2.11 expected goals per 60 at five-on-five, the best mark in the league, and 2.00 high-danger shots per 60, fifth-best. A goaltender who was slightly below expected behind the stingiest structure in hockey is now going to work behind the 27th-ranked one. Nothing in his record says he is the answer to that.

The dynasty formula, and what is left of it

It is worth being precise about how the 2024 and 2025 Panthers won, because the memory has already smoothed it over. Those teams were not offensive juggernauts; the 2024 champions scored 268 goals, 11th in the league. They won because they allowed 200, one behind Winnipeg for the fewest in hockey, with Bobrovsky 11 points above the league in front of a blue line that gave up nothing from the slot. The formula was defence first, finishing second, goaltending as the margin. Bobrovsky's two good years, per the seven-season chart in last week's piece, were 2023-24 and 2024-25. They were the two Cups. That is not a coincidence.

Now audit what survives. The finishing is coming back and then some; that is the Barkov and Tkachuk effect, and it is the strongest part of the bounce-back case. The blue line is the same six names two years older, having just posted the 27th-ranked slot defence in the league, reinforced by two 30-somethings on depth deals. The crease went from a goaltender in the worst year of his career to a goaltender in one of the two worst of his, and a backup arriving from the league's best structure into one of its worst. Of the three things that made Florida a champion, one is restored, one is unaddressed, and one was swapped for its statistical twin.

The honest counter

The strongest argument for the consensus is that the offence might be good enough to make the rest irrelevant. Brady Tkachuk drove a 62 percent expected-goal share at five-on-five in Ottawa with 3.48 expected goals for per 60 on his ice, numbers that would have led Florida by a distance. Line him up with Barkov and Reinhart, put Matthew Tkachuk on a second line with Bennett and Verhaeghe, and this is the deepest top nine the franchise has had. A team that generates 3.0 expected goals an hour can absorb a 2.7 high-danger rate against and still win most nights, because it will spend the night in the other zone. Carolina just won a Cup as a 56 percent team with goaltending that did no better than expected, and the case for Florida is that it is about to become that kind of team.

And Markstrom's floor is a fair point too. The bar for improvement on last season's crease is .877, and a .900 Markstrom, which is roughly his career line, is worth eight or nine goals on its own. Health plus Brady plus a league-average goaltender is a playoff team in the Atlantic, and probably a home-ice one.

But "a playoff team" is not what the consensus is saying. The consensus is top five, a Cup favourite again, and that version requires the defence to be what it was two years ago. Nothing about the summer suggests Zito thinks it needs to be. He paid two firsts to make the offence overwhelming, and three depth forwards plus a third-round pick, for $6 million of cap, to make the crease adequate, which is a bet that the Panthers can win 5-3 every night. The two teams that won the last two Cups in this building won 3-1.

What would prove me wrong

Two numbers by the 30-game mark. First, Florida's high-danger shots against per 60 at five-on-five: if it is back under 2.3, the structure has been restored with Barkov's minutes and the summer's inaction on the blue line was correct. If it is still above 2.6, the Panthers are trying to outscore their own zone. Second, the crease as a whole: if Markstrom and Schmid are at or above zero goals saved above expected combined, Florida has found a tandem and this column will say so. If they are at minus-8 or worse, the Panthers replaced their goaltending problem with an identical one and paid a first-round pick premium on the wing to hide it.

Florida will score, and by December the Barkov-Tkachuk-Tkachuk line will have produced the highlight package the summer was designed for. Watch the other end. The number that decides whether this is a top-five team is not goals for, which is solved, but high-danger shots against, which nobody in the front office treated as a problem. If that number comes down with Barkov's minutes, Zito was right and the crease will not matter. If it does not, the Panthers will have spent the most aggressive summer in the league building a team that can outscore anyone except the one it used to be.