(Hello, this is a feature that will run through the entire season and aims to recap the weekend’s events and boils those events down to one admittedly superficial fact or stupid opinion about each team. Feel free to complain about it.)

It took a while — almost half the season, in fact — but we now finally have our Team Doubling Down On Bad Process And Everyone Thinks It's Actually Good.

In this case, the role of the Maple Leafs/Avalanche/Flames is played by the Florida Panthers.

They lead the division by three points but also have a game in hand on Montreal behind them, and also ended Sunday night's tilt against the Wild tied with the fourth-best point total in the league. The Panthers therefore closed the weekend with 50 points from 39 games. But that shutout of the Rangers was one in which they were utterly dominated in every facet of the game besides “putting the puck in the net.” Sound familiar?

The Cats ended Saturday's game as a 47.8 percent possession team, which isn't quite as bottom-of-the-barrel as their defiant forebears carried through. But it's still 22nd in the league, behind bad teams like Buffalo and Edmonton, and only ahead of a murderer's row of abject poorness (Columbus, Calgary, New York, Arizona, and Colorado, among others).

Things are even worse when you consider the rate at which they trade high-quality chances, a number which on Saturday night was fourth-worst in the NHL. They also get killed in shots-for (48.1 percent, 24th in the league) and so on.

And yet, their goal differential? Plus-12, and fifth in the NHL.

Again, we've seen all this play out before, so it's no surprise that in the past few days the Panthers extended GM Dale Tallon for another three years, and about 24 hours later announced that coach Gerard Gallant for two.

At this point, it should be no surprise to see a team conflate winning over a period this short with overall success, but one immediately wonders whether any lessons have been learned from the post-”Save By Roy” era. Or the post-”Carlyle is a genius” era. Or the post-”Bob Hartley is the best coach in the league” era.

The following tells you an awful lot about what the Panthers have actually done this year. This isn't score-adjusted but believe me when I tell you score-adjusting things doesn't make it look any better.

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It is easy enough to say Tallon has done a good job rebuilding this team, and easier still to say Gallant has done a good job running it on a day-to-day basis. The results in the standings table would seem to speak for themselves.



But the question of whether this is a team that's actually good, right now, is no.

The harder one to answer is whether they're even trending in that direction.

Just to get things out of the way very quickly before moving onto the broader topic: The Panthers are mostly good this year because Roberto Luongo is turning in a .929 season at age 36, and when he's out of the lineup 30-year-old Al Montoya is coming in hot at .930. The team's 5-on-5 save percentage is .941 this year, tied for the highest in the league. Luongo should probably be leading the Vezina discussion at this point based on his individual stats and the dim quality of the team in front of him, because his team gets outshot and out-chanced on what is basically a nightly basis and he's been borderline bulletproof, conceding the second-fewest goals at full strength in the league among goalies with at least 30 appearances this year, despite facing the third-most shots.