‘Everybody panic’? What Will Ferrell’s ‘Semi-Pro’ has to do with Panthers’ Game 4 loss
“Semi-Pro” is the underrated gem of Will Ferrell’s filmography, and Paul Maurice apparently knows this. From the “MegaBowl” to postgame bear wrestling, the basketball movie explains a lot about the silliness of sports and also, the coach decided, his Florida Panthers’ first loss in more than two weeks Wednesday.
At the end of the film, a bear gets loose in the fictional Flint Tropics’ arena, and the team’s player-coach-owner, as portrayed by Ferrell, screams, “Everybody panic!”
It’s absurd, of course, and mocking the character’s constant histrionics. It also sort of summed up how Maurice felt after the Panthers’ 2-1 loss in Sunrise.
“I’m thinking of Will Ferrell,” Maurice said Wednesday, only a few minutes after Florida failed to finish off a second-round sweep of the Maple Leafs.
Needless to say, the Panthers aren’t panicking.
There was frustration inside their locker room, of course. There was also nothing close to any real sense of worry.
Florida still leads the series 3-1 and can clinch its first trip to the Eastern Conference finals in Game 5 on Friday at 7 p.m. at Scotiabank Arena in Toronto.
“We lost a game today. That happens in the playoffs. We get to pay the next one,” Maurice said. “We’re all good with that? It wasn’t so fabulous a game that we don’t get to play the next one.”
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The loss brought an end to a franchise-record six-game postseason winning streak, which carried the Panthers back from the brink of elimination against the Presidents’ Trophy-winning Bruins in Round 1 and now the verge of eliminating the Maple Leafs in Round 2.
It was a rare occasion for Florida, which had a chance to be the first team to lock in its spot in the NHL Conference Finals, and it had Maurice in a sarcastic mood.
The play of Toronto’s rookie goaltender, who stopped all but one of the shots he faced?
“We wanted to make him feel comfortable,” he joked.
The performance by star goaltender Sergei Bobrovsky, who made 23 saves on 25 shots?
Maybe it would have been better if he wasn’t any good because, “then we could just blame him,” he quipped.
The strange first Maple Leafs goal, which bounced off an official and right into the slot?
“We put the refs in the wrong part of the ice a couple of times,” he said. “That got us in trouble.”
The margin for error was thin in Game 4 — really, it has been in this entire series, despite the count — and Toronto eked out a victory this time.
“It’s been going pretty good for us, so sometimes to lose a game like that — it’s not the way you want it, but we were right there to the end,” forward Sam Reinhart said Wednesday. “That’s playoff hockey.”
Shots were even at 25-25, the Panthers had a 28-21 edge in scoring chances and the Maple Leafs had a 15-13 advantage in high-danger chances. Toronto got the weird bounce on a power play to go up 1-0, then scored the game-winning goal on a long-range shot through traffic to go up 2-0 in the third before Reinhart scored a power-play goal with 7:47 left to give Florida a real shot at a comeback, only to have time run out.
It was truly a game either team could have won, and the Panthers still have three more cracks to win one more.
“It was an even game,” star defenseman Brandon Montour said. “We’ve got to clean a little bit up. It probably wasn’t our best game. They’re obviously a desperate team and we’ve got to be just as desperate.”
Florida was happy with its level of intensity, although maybe the Maple Leafs were just a little more intense.
They blocked 21 shots and outhit the Panthers, 26-21. It was their tightest defensive performance of the series, in terms of limiting shots, and they threw their bodies in front of pucks like their season was on the line — because it was.
There should be lessons in there for Florida. Life was a little too easy for Toronto goaltender Joseph Woll — the 25 shots matched the Panthers’ fewest of the 2023 Stanley Cup playoffs — and the Maple Leafs’ 11 giveaways were their fewest of the second round. It meant Woll, in just his 12th start in the NHL, only had to make four 5-on-5 high-danger saves to get his first playoff win.
“We didn’t quite establish our forecheck enough,” Reinhart said. “We did it early on and we were playing with some pace, but I think we got away from that.”
As long as it gets back to playing the way it did throughout its six-game winning streak, Florida should be able to finish off Toronto. Even if it plays the way it did in Game 4, it might, anyway.
Either way, the Panthers feel good about their position, even knowing how quickly a comeback can start in the Stanley Cup playoffs, and it’s hard to blame them.
“We don’t have to do anything different. We just have to keep playing our game, be patient,” Bobrovsky said Wednesday. “They are a good team, so nobody said it’s going to be easy. It is what it is. We’re going back to Toronto and the series is going to go on.”
