BOSTON — Gustav Forsling scored the tiebreaking goal on a rebound with 1:33 left, and Sergei Bobrovsky stopped 22 shots for the Florida Panthers to beat the Boston Bruins 2-1 on Friday night and win their second-round playoff series in six games.

The Panthers advanced to the Eastern Conference finals, where they will face the New York Rangers. Game 1 is on Wednesday night at Madison Square Garden.

Anton Lundell scored for the Panthers and also set up the game-winner when his shot was deflected to the left side of the net. Forsling came in and beat Jeremy Swayman. The Panthers, who also knocked the Bruins out of the playoffs after their record-setting regular-season last year, won all three games in Boston.

Swayman stopped 26 shots for the Bruins. Pavel Zacha scored to give Boston a 1-0 lead late in the first period, but they were unable to beat Bobrovsky again.

The Bruins got captain Brad Marchand back after he missed two games with an injury believed to be a concussion. The longest-tenured member of the roster got a big ovation at introductions, but did not figure in the scoring.

Boston took the lead with a minute left in the first period when Jake DeBrusk made a no-look backhanded pass to Zacha to send him on a breakaway. Brandon Carlo also helped by flattening Carter Verhaeghe at the blue line to keep him from pursuing the puck.

But Florida tied it with seven minutes left in the second, after a scramble in front of the Boston net that left DeBrusk on the ice. Lundell swooped into the slot and swept the puck past Swayman.

The Bruins were called for having too many men on the ice for a record seventh time this postseason. The bench minor early in the second period did not result in a goal for the Panthers.

The Florida Panthers waited out the Boston Bruins in their second round Stanley Cup playoff series.

And patience paid off.

The Panthers and Bruins were knotted 1-1 in Game 6 on Friday until defenseman Gustav Forsling broke the stalemate for Florida with just over ninety seconds left in regulation. Boston goalie Jeremy Swayman let out the juiciest of rebounds he’d love to have to back and Forsling made no mistake punching the Panthers ticket to an Eastern Conference final against New York.

Now that should be a high scoring affair.

How the Panthers got there — and what to expect from their series with the Rangers — is here.

Savvy Sergei

Most goaltenders will admit it’s better to stay busy. And in this series against Boston, Sergei Bobrovsky decidedly was not. Boston averaged the fewest shots on goal among remaining playoff teams (25 per game), and there were lengthy stretches where Bobrovsky didn’t have much to do.

It would be easy to dismiss his contributions to Florida’s success by just looking at the numbers then (.896 save percentage, 2.51 goals-against average) but that doesn’t tell the whole Bobrovsky tale.

The Panthers got the timely saves from their veteran. He wasn’t leaky at the wrong time, despite being underworked. Plus, if you take out the Panthers’ 5-1 loss in Game 1, Bobrovsky didn’t allow more than two goals in an outing the rest of the way.

Being dialed in at crucial moments is how goaltenders set themselves apart in the playoffs, and that’s what Bobrovsky did for Florida throughout the second-round run.

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Bobrovsky makes back-to-back saves in heroic fashion

Bobrovsky makes back-to-back saves in heroic fashion
Sergei Bobrovsky makes two consecutive saves in the final minutes of the second period.

Bolstered by balance

The Panthers tapped in with 12 different goal scorers against the Bruins, with all but three of their forwards landing on the scoresheet with at least one. There was no singular scoring star (although Aleksander Barkov came closest to that moniker, by pacing the group with three) and so Boston had its hands full trying to keep all four lines from running through them.

Florida didn’t need it’s top skaters to do all the heavy lifting, and that’s a critical component at playoff time. Bruins netminder Jeremy Swayman was terrific again in this series against a Panthers’ group firing the second-most shots on net among remaining playoff teams (36.5 per game), and that’s a difficult ask for any goalie to stand up to when they’re not offering the sort of goal support Florida does. That’s a major reason why the Panthers are moving on — and Boston’s headed home for the season.

No sleeping on special teams

It’s the great equalizer, right? Generally, the team who wins that special teams battle comes out on top in a series.

Florida was the unequivocal victor there against Boston.

The Panthers ripped in six power-play goals — and one shorthanded score — while the Bruins managed a single goal on the man advantage. The difference that makes in undeniable in the final outcome for both sides. Florida won by larger margins in this series — including two games by four goals or more — than they did against the Tampa Bay Lightning in the first round — where only two wins were by two goals or more — but the Lightning matched them on special teams.

When the Bruins fell down in that area, the Panthers pounced all the way to a series win.

Postseason poise

There’s something to be said for owning the moment. Florida did just that.

The blowout in Game 1 could have rattled the Panthers and set an ominous tone for the series ahead. Instead, it seemed to settle them down. There’s confidence that comes from overcoming early obstacles, and any challenges the Panthers faced from there were met with composure.

Florida wasn’t ruined without Sam Bennett in Game 1 and 2, while the Bruins fared worse without Brad Marchand in Game 4 and 5. The Panthers could stay on course when Boston was up 1-0 after the first period in Game 4 and eventually chipped their way back to victory. Yes, there was a controversial goalie interference sequence that factored into Florida’s win, but the call was out of their control.

The Panthers focused on what they could do to succeed, and it paid off with a consecutive Eastern Conference finals bid.

How the Panthers match up with the New York Rangers

A conference finals matchup between the Rangers and Panthers could break records for playoff goal scoring.

No, seriously.

Florida and New York are the third and fourth top offenses in the entire playoff field, averaging 3.70 and 3.50 goals per game respectively. Their power plays are excellent (31.4% for New York and 23.7% for Florida) and the Panthers are second in shots on net (34.0 per game) which would only add to the potential firepower these two teams could generate on one sheet.

Matthew Tkachuk (four goals and 13 points in the postseason), Barkov (five goals and 13 points), and Carter Verhaeghe (six goals and 10 points) would give the Rangers’ elite a run for their money trading chances though, especially if the rush game opens up.

New York’s defense would have to improve over its second-round performance to keep them from running wild. However, the back-and-forth that could come out of this series would highlight what made both Florida and New York so entertaining in their second-round series respectively (although the Rangers stumbled a bit towards the end attempting to close Carolina out).

Another interesting aspect of a Rangers-Panthers series is, of course, in the crease. Sergei Bobrovksy’s numbers (.896 SV%, 2.51 GAA) aren’t exactly on par with Igor Shesterkin‘s (.923 SV%, 2.40). But Bobrovsky wasn’t tested often by Boston and that, as mentioned above, can affect how a goalie performs.

Regardless, Bobrovsky was terrific when he had to be. Shesterkin has been that and more for the Rangers throughout the playoffs. New York’s bread and butter though has been its attack up front plus excellent netminding, and a series against Florida would give them the opportunity to lean on both.

Comparisons to Tony Gwynn began to follow Luis Arráez when he first established himself in the big leagues, growing more prevalent as the hits piled up and the batting titles followed. Arráez wasn’t as prolific, but his skills and the way he utilized them — consistently spraying baseballs to unoccupied spaces all over the field, barreling pitches regardless of how or where they were thrown — made links to one of history’s most gifted hitters seem inevitable.

Tony Gwynn Jr., the late Hall of Famer’s son, often heard them and largely understood them. But it wasn’t until the night of May 4, while watching Arráez compile four hits in his debut with the same San Diego Padres team his father starred for, that he actually felt them.

“I honestly had goosebumps watching him put together at-bats,” said Gwynn Jr., a retired major league outfielder who serves as an analyst for the Padres’ radio broadcasts. “It took me back to watching film with my dad as he was basically doing the same thing.”

Gwynn was universally celebrated throughout the 1980s and ’90s, but Arráez stands as a polarizing figure in the slug-obsessed, launch-angle-consumed era in which he plays. Some, like the Miami Marlins team that traded him away earlier this month, see a one-dimensional player who doesn’t provide enough speed, power or defensive acumen to build around. Others, like the Padres, who used four prospects to acquire him at a time when trades rarely happen, see the type of offensive mastery that more than makes up for it.

What’s inarguable is that Arráez is the ultimate outlier.

Case in point: The publicly available bat-speed metrics recently unveiled by Statcast feature a graph that places hitters based on their relationship between average bat speed (X-axis) and squared-up rate (Y-axis). All alone on the top left corner, far removed from the other 217 qualified hitters, is Arráez. He has the slowest swing in the sport but also its most efficient, theoretically, because he meets pitches with the sweet spot of his bat more often than anybody else.

Arráez has only 24 home runs in 2,165 career at-bats. But his .324 batting average since his 2019 debut leads the majors, 10 points higher than that of Freddie Freeman, the runner-up. He walks at a below-average clip, but his major league-leading 7.5% strikeout rate is about a third of the MLB average during that stretch, cartoonish in the most strikeout-prone era in baseball history.

He is elite even when he chases: The major league average on pitches outside the rulebook strike zone since the start of the 2023 season is .162. Arráez’s: .297.

“Now with the analytics they focus on home runs, they focus on guys hitting the ball hard but hitting .200,” Arráez said in Spanish. “But in my mind, and with all the work that I do, I stay focused on just doing my job — not try to do too much or try to do what they’re telling me to do. Analysts say my exit velocity is [among] the lowest in the big leagues. Amen. Let them keep saying that. As long as I have my health, I keep doing things to help my team, I’m going to be fine.”

Arráez became the first player to win a batting title in the American and National leagues in consecutive seasons last year. But trade rumors surrounded him from the onset of 2024, his second-to-last season before free agency. As a 27-year-old two-time All-Star with a .324 career batting average, a sterling reputation and a stated desire to remain in South Florida, he was a player the directionless Marlins franchise could build around. But a new front office considered him expendable. A 9-24 start to the season created an opening. And on May 3, five minutes before the first pitch was thrown in Oakland, Marlins manager Skip Schumaker called Arráez into his office.

“I’m not going to lie to you,” Arráez said, “I wasn’t ready to be traded.”

Schumaker told Arráez he’d have to remove him from the lineup because a deal with the Padres was close. He gave him the option of returning to the clubhouse or going into the dugout for one final moment with his teammates. Arráez stayed until the fifth inning, retreated to his hotel room, waited on a call from Padres officials and hopped on a flight at noon the following day to meet his new team.

Arráez didn’t have enough clothes for the additional six days of the Padres’ road trip. He wore his Marlins-colored cleats through stops in Phoenix and Chicago and compiled eight hits in 20 at-bats during that stretch. After the team got back to San Diego, he used the May 9 off day to search for an apartment and spend time with his mom, wife and three daughters, who flew in for a weekend visit, then delivered a walk-off single against the rival Los Angeles Dodgers in his home debut the following night. He’s still living out of a hotel room crammed with unopened boxes, but he already feels wanted. Embraced, even.

“They’ve welcomed me here with open arms,” Arráez said. “I feel as if I’ve been here since spring training.”

Arráez was a 4-year-old in Venezuela when Gwynn played the final season of his 20-year career in 2001. When Gwynn died in 2014, Arráez was still a teenager on the Minnesota Twins‘ Dominican Summer League team. Hearing comparisons to Gwynn made him curious enough to find old clips of a player who was mostly foreign to him. He began to study his approach to hitting, marveling specifically at Gwynn’s ability to let pitches travel deep into the strike zone before driving them to the opposite field.

Conversations with one of Gwynn’s most important mentors, Twins icon and gifted batsman Rod Carew, brought Arráez more insight. Now similar conversations are taking place with Gwynn’s only son. When the Padres return from their seven-game road trip through Atlanta and Cincinnati, Arráez plans to visit the Gwynn statue that sits just outside of Petco Park. He isn’t necessarily leaning into the comparisons, but he isn’t running from them, either.

“It’s such a great experience when fans embrace you with open arms and tell you that I’m a mini Tony Gwynn, and that I have a lot of traits that remind them of him,” Arráez said. “It’s nice to hear people say things like that.”

Perhaps the quality Gwynn and Arráez share most is self-awareness. “Know thyself” is a line Gwynn Jr. heard his father say repeatedly growing up, one that translated directly to how he approached his profession: He knew his strengths, worked relentlessly to maximize them and never tried to emulate others. Arráez’s new teammates already see the same in him.

“It’s not like he goes up there and just does it,” Padres third baseman Manny Machado said. “He puts a lot of work in the cage, before games, even before BP and stuff like that. He knows his strength, and he works on it.”

Baseball’s evolution has made it harder than ever for someone like Arráez to exist. Pitchers have never thrown harder, data has never been more prevalent, batting averages have hardly ever been lower. But Padres manager Mike Shildt is adamant that Arráez shouldn’t be an anomaly.

He recalled an old San Diego Union-Tribune article that re-ran May 9, on what would have been Gwynn’s 64th birthday. It detailed the amount of time Gwynn spent working on hitting, and it validated something Shildt had long believed: That more players could hit .300, even today, if they worked on the craft of doing so as diligently and as pointedly as Gwynn did. As Arráez does.

“When you have an ability to hit a ball to all the different areas, you’re going to hit,” Shildt said. “And big picture, our industry hasn’t taught that anymore. It’s not valued anymore. It’s not monetized anymore. You can’t quantify this, but it’s a shame how many amateur and lower-level professional players have been excluded from continuing to play because they don’t meet a measurable. They don’t meet an exit velocity or bat speed or launch angle, or all of those things that this game is now basically recruiting and monetizing blindly. They’re just getting hits. And somehow that became out of vogue in our industry in general.”

But those are now someone else’s problems. The Padres will gladly take Arráez, all he his and all he isn’t, and slot him ahead of Machado, Fernando Tatis Jr. and Xander Bogaerts in hopes of riding his singular bat to the playoffs.

Arráez is still six batting titles away from catching Gwynn. He isn’t anywhere near as good a defender or as lethal a baserunner as Gwynn was early in his career, and he needs another decade-plus of similar production — heightened production, actually, given the .345 batting average Gwynn boasted between his ages 27 and 37 seasons — to even approach him as a hitter. But Arráez’s style is the closest we’ve got.

And if there’s one place that can appreciate it, it’s his new one.

“This fan base is going to fall in love with him,” Gwynn Jr. said. “It’s how a lot of them grew up watching baseball.”