Before the season started, it wouldn’t have been a shocker if someone told you that the Florida Panthers and Carolina Hurricanes would meet in the Eastern Conference Final.

The Panthers were coming off a Presidents’ Trophy season, while the Canes finished just six points behind the Cats and made a couple of big additions in the offseason.

But expectations change over the course of an 82-game season and it’s fair to say that both of these hockey teams saw a lot of people hop off the bandwagon for different reasons over the last six months.

In the case of the Hurricanes, it was because the team lost key scoring forwards Max Pacioretty and Andrei Svechnikov to injury, further exacerbating the club’s key flaw: It can struggle to score. 

As for the Panthers, they struggled for consistency throughout the first 60 games of the regular season and snuck into the playoffs during the campaign’s last few days.

A first-round date with the record-setting Boston Bruins was expected to be quick and uneventful, but the Panthers had other ideas and a couple of weeks later here we are. 

Carolina is a -135 favorite to win the series and -145 to win Game 1. 

(8 p.m. ET)

The Hurricanes are an outlier team in the National Hockey League.

While there really aren’t huge adjustments teams need to make from opponent to opponent in the NHL, that isn’t the case with the Canes.

Carolina is never stagnant and relies on its all-action forecheck and pressure on the puck to create chaos.

And when they do have the puck, the Hurricanes are hellbent on throwing everything they can at the net.

No team registered more shot attempts than the Canes during the regular season.

That should be quite the adjustment for the Florida Panthers.

The Cats were terrific in their gentleman’s sweep of the Toronto Maple Leafs, but the Leafs are a patient team that wants to hold onto the puck and create high-quality chances rather than just fling the biscuit at the net.

Florida was able to counter that approach by punishing the Leafs with physical play if they held onto the puck for a second too long and eventually that wore down Toronto.

The Hurricanes will be a lot tougher to push around than Toronto.

Florida will still want to be physical against the Canes, but it’s unlikely that the Panthers will be able to impose their will in quite the same way that they did against the Leafs.

It’ll take Florida some time to adjust and it wouldn’t be a shock to see the Cats get outshot by a wide margin in Game 1 as they try to find their way into this best-of-7.

Carolina has been terrific at home and is a deserving favorite in Game 1, but the price looks a bit too high to get involved. Instead, we’ll focus on the total.

Sergei Bobrovsky was magnificent against the Leafs, but it is reasonable to expect him to come back down to earth — even a little bit — in this series.

Bobrovsky posted a .941 save percentage and +9.1 Goals Saved Above Expected (GSAx) in Round 2 and perhaps he stays red hot, but it seems more likely that he regresses towards a more sustainable level over the course of this series.

Additionally, Bobrovsky at times can struggle with rebound control and the Canes are experts at generating rebound chances and pouncing on them, so this could end up as a tough matchup for the Russian netminder.

It’s also worth nothing that the fact that Bobrovsky had to stand on his head against Toronto is an indictment of the play in front of him from Florida.

Toronto didn’t score much in the series, but the Leafs sure did generate a ton of scoring chances. They just ran into a red-hot netminder.

The over 5.5 looks worth a shot in Game 1.

Over 5.5 goals (-128, FanDuel)