Everybody picked Florida, and the whole bet is Markström's crease

The league did its homework and handed the Panthers the favorite's jersey, which suits me fine as a lifelong Panthers believer. But every one of those ballots is a bet on one thing, and it isn't the Tkachuk brothers. It's whether a 36-year-old goalie coming off an .883 season can hold the crease for 82 games.

Tonight's opener in Raleigh is the first installment of that answer, against the defending champions.

The ballots

A poll of 22 coaches and 13 executives gave Florida 20 of 35 votes to win the Cup. Colorado got six. A separate survey of 35 players had the Panthers at 15 votes and Carolina at six. The books have Florida and Carolina as co-favorites at +650.

The voters liked the skaters, and so do I. What they weren't sure about was the goalie, and that uncertainty showed up across the voting.

The crease

Sergei Bobrovsky was in net for both Cup runs, in 2024 and 2025. He signed in Toronto this summer, so Zito sent Evan Rodrigues and Jesper Boqvist to New Jersey for Jacob Markström and called him "an established veteran leader in this league who possesses size and a relentless drive to win."

The numbers are less polite. Markström went .883 with a 3.07 GAA in 44 games for the Devils last season. The year before, he was a .900 goalie, and the season before that he posted .905 in Calgary. That's a steady slide, not a blip.

Behind him is Akira Schmid, 26, playing for his next contract and never trusted with a starter's workload in the NHL. That's not a safety net. That's a question mark wearing a mask.

Why I'm not panicking yet

I remember Markström in a Panthers sweater the first time, back in the lean years, when the playoffs were a rumor. He played 43 games here and the team won 11 of them, and then Florida shipped him to Vancouver in the Luongo trade in 2014.

That kid was playing behind a bad team. This one plays behind a group that has made breakouts miserable for three years.

He knows what he walked into. "Everyone here has won, and they've won multiple times," Markström said. Barkov liked what he saw: "Big goalie, too. Covers a lot of the net, and he competes a lot."

A big goalie who competes doesn't fix an .883 by himself, though. What fixes it is the stuff this team does without the puck: keep shots on the outside, win the wall, and clear the front so he can see it.

Last year this room lost 541 man-games to injury, the most in the league. Fewer bodies in the press box should mean fewer nights the goalie has to steal one.

It's a Heat thing, really. Nobody down here cares about your regular-season résumé. They care about what you do in April.

Pabs' read

Markström doesn't have to be Bobrovsky. He has to be a .900 guy who doesn't lose a game in the first ten minutes, and Maurice has to trust Schmid enough to give the old man a night off.

If Markström is at .900 by Thanksgiving, the ballots were right. If he's under .890, Zito's phone starts ringing, and Gord already laid out why Florida walked away from Hellebuyck the first time.

My call: he's at .902 by Thanksgiving, and nobody in Sunrise is asking about Hellebuyck anymore.