Panthers, Avalanche making late playoff push

The Coaches Room is a weekly column by one of four former NHL coaches and assistants who will turn their critical gaze to the game and explain it through the lens of a teacher. Jim Corsi, David Marcoux, Paul MacLean and Joe Mullen will take turns providing insight.
In this edition, MacLean, former coach of the Ottawa Senators, takes a look at two of the hottest teams in the NHL, the Florida Panthers and Colorado Avalanche. With less than three weeks remaining in the regular season, the Panthers and Avalanche are vying to make the 2018 Stanley Cup Playoffs after missing the postseason a year ago, a testament to Florida coach Bob Boughner and Colorado coach Jared Bednar.

The final month of the NHL regular season brings with it extreme pressure, nail-biting playoff races and, for members of the coaching fraternity, plenty of indigestion.
It also provides plenty of Cinderella stories of teams who are desperately vying for postseason berths a year after dealing with the bitterness of being on the outside looking in at the Stanley Cup tournament.
As the race for the 2018 playoffs winds down to an exciting conclusion, the Florida Panthers and Colorado Avalanche are two of the teams that meet those criteria.
The Panthers are 11-2-1 in their past 14 games. The Avalanche have one regulation loss in their past 12 games (8-1-3). These are the recipes of teams that normally find success by getting hot at the right time.

At first blush, each team has the type of franchise players who are answering the bell and playing their best down the stretch, when their teams need them the most.
In Florida, Aleksander Barkov has developed into one of the best two-way forwards in the League. With 73 points (26 goals, 47 assists) in 70 games, he's a rarity in the modern-day NHL, a player who averages more than a point per game.
Avalanche forward Nathan MacKinnon is having a Hart Trophy-type season with 91 points (38 goals, 53 assists) in 65 games and is proving to be the type of dominant player general manager Joe Sakic and the Colorado organization always thought he would be when he was selected No. 1 in the 2013 NHL Draft.
But the strong finishes by the Panthers and Avalanche cut much deeper than a couple of marquee names in their respective lineups. Coaching, systems and organizational patience all play big roles as well.
Florida has been crawling up the standings, and a lot of it is due to coach Bob Boughner and his staff. He had a certain style he wanted them to play and he's stuck with it even when the results weren't instantaneous. He has been great in communicating with his players and continuing to support them with the message that the results would come if they stuck to the plan.
Health has also been a key in the Panthers' late-season surge. Getting guys like Barkov and starting goaltender Roberto Luongo back from injury has been huge. When your top players are buying what you are selling, more often than not the rest of the team will follow suit.
Boughner is a first-year coach but he's no rookie in this business. Boughner coached Windsor of the Ontario Hockey League from 2006-15, guiding the team to the Memorial Cup championship in 2009 and 2010. From 2015-17, he was an assistant to Peter DeBoer with the San Jose Sharks and was part of the staff on the team that went to the Stanley Cup Final in 2016. DeBoer has worked in this League for a long time, and Boughner certainly learned from him.

Colorado had some growing pains last season. The Avalanche (22-56-4) finished with 48 points, the fewest in the NHL, then watched the New Jersey Devils win the draft lottery despite Colorado having the best odds.
Credit coach Jared Bednar with sticking with it in his second season behind the Colorado bench. I think the opportunity he's basically embraced with the trade that sent forward Matt Duchene to the Ottawa Senators on Nov. 5 has spurred the rise of MacKinnon as a dominant player in the NHL.
Bednar has given MacKinnon the opportunity to be a first-line center, and Nathan has made the most of the opportunity. He's basically taken that team a long way.
It's hard for a coach to take positives from a disappointing season like the one the Avalanche had in 2016-17, but Bednar and his staff found ways to get the players to take a glass-half-full view of what happened and carry that into this season. It's a tough task, but they managed to get the message across.
General manager Joe Sakic and Colorado ownership showed patience during this process. They understood it would take a year for everything to get figured out. Bednar was the coach of the American Hockey League's Lake Erie Monsters when they won the Calder Cup in 2016. That's not an easy thing to do. The Avalanche brass knew this guy was a good coach and gave him time to prove it at the NHL level.
The way MacKinnon is playing, you can see how the guys around him are playing with a similar sense of confidence. It's the same way Florida has been playing too. They are feeding off the fact that their best players -- MacKinnon and Barkov -- are playing like it.
The Avalanche (40-25-8) have 88 points and hold the first wild card into the playoffs from the Western Conference. The Panthers (37-27-7, 81 points) trail New Jersey by one point for the second wild card in the Eastern Conference and have two games in hand.
As usual, the playoff race seems to be going down to the final weekend of the season. The way they've been playing, the Avalanche and Panthers will be right in the thick of things -- deservedly so.