Hurricanes-Panthers takeaways: Florida pushes Carolina to brink with dominant Game 3

The only reason Boqvist was in the lineup was because Sam Reinhart, one of Florida's other top stars, was not playing. 

Most teams losing a player as good as Reinhart would be in trouble for a conference final playoff game. It never even came close to mattering for the Panthers.

Carolina's Eastern Conference Final nightmare continues

It's just hard to comprehend how a single franchise can keep getting this far in the playoffs, and then keep falling flat on its face when it gets here.

Saturday's loss is the 15th consecutive Eastern Conference loss for the Carolina Hurricanes franchise going back to the 2009 playoffs. 

Even worse, they have not even had a lead in the past five Eastern Conference Final games. 

The lack of goal-scoring against elite teams remains a problem for them in the playoffs, but this series has introduced a new problem -- they simply can not stop the Panthers.

Carolina was one of the NHL's best defensive teams during the regular season, and the Panthers are just going through them with little to no resistance.

Florida has scored at least five goals in each of the first three games of the series, including five goals in the third period of Saturday's game alone. 

The Hurricanes have one big flaw (a lack of star power) that almost certainly lowers their ceiling. But this series might simply be more about Florida being an absolute force of a hockey team. 

Florida hockey is ruining the idea of parity in the NHL

If Florida can win just one of the next four games, it will be its third consecutive Stanley Cup Final appearance.

They will have a chance to win their second Stanley Cup in a row.

This is noteworthy because the idea of a back-to-back champion in the NHL was almost completely unheard of for about two decades in the NHL throughout the late 1990s and most of the 2000s and 2010s. 

If Florida can pull this off, however, they will be the third team in the past decade to win two in a row — joining the 2016 and 2017 Pittsburgh Penguins and the 2020 and 2021 Tampa Bay Lightning — and the second team to reach three consecutive finals (joining the Lightning in 2020, 2021 and 2022). 

It would also mean that the past six Eastern Conference representatives in the Stanley Cup Final would be either Florida or Tampa Bay. 

The idea of parity might be slipping away in the NHL, given all of that.