Six of eight points on the road, and a power play on mute

Six points out of eight on a four-game road trip, without the captain for most of it, with a power play that scored once. I'll take that. I'll just take it with a warning label.

The cats come home 2-0-2 for Saturday's opener against Minnesota at 6 p.m. The trip opened with Gustav Forsling's overtime goal in Raleigh. It lost Aleksander Barkov in San Jose, dropped another overtime game in Anaheim and closed with a 2-1 win in Los Angeles on Matthew Tkachuk's goal at 11:20 of the third.

The number

1-for-23. That's Florida's power play across four games, by our count, and those 23 opportunities are the most any team in the league has drawn so far this season.

Read that again. The Panthers are getting the opportunities, consistently, and then handing them right back to the opposition.

The part that should calm you down

Take every power play out of it, both ways, and Florida outscored its opponents 7-4 on the trip, by our count. It outshot them 105-88 over the four games. That's a team winning the hockey that happens at full strength, on the road, in four different buildings.

The kill held up too: 15-for-19, and a perfect five-for-five in L.A. Anaheim's three power-play goals are the only reason the Ducks got two points out of that night.

So this isn't a team that can't play. It's a team that keeps winning the difficult battles and then fumbling the easy ones.

Why the power play is stuck

You don't lose Barkov and keep the same power play. He's the player who settles the puck down and makes the next decision simple for everybody else. Without him, the units are trying to be creative, and creativity has produced exactly one goal in 23 opportunities.

In L.A., Matthew Tkachuk got seven minutes of power-play time, per NHL data, with Sam Reinhart and Brady Tkachuk at 6.5 each. Those are the right names. The problem isn't who's out there.

My call: simplify it. Get the puck to Seth Jones up top, get two bodies on the goalie and shoot through the traffic. Jones played 25.6 minutes in L.A., most on either team, and scored the tying goal. He's earned the puck on his stick.

Lineup watch

Brad Marchand left Tuesday's game in the second period with a leg injury and is day-to-day. He played 9.6 minutes before he left. Aaron Ekblad is day-to-day for personal reasons. Barkov is out six to eight weeks.

That's a lot of experience missing from one bench at the same time. Garnet Hathaway still answered the bell against Joel Edmundson in the second period in L.A. That's ferda, and on a night the power play went 0-for-6, it mattered.

I've watched this organization scratch out points with nothing working before, through plenty of forgettable seasons. The difference now is the expectation. Six of eight with a broken power play is fine in October. It won't be fine in December.

Pabs' read: The five-on-five game travels, so the cats are fine. Fix the power play against the Wild and this trip turns into a warning shot for the rest of the Atlantic.