The Florida Panthers and Tampa Bay Lightning will play each other in the Eastern Conference First Round for the second straight season.

It will also be the third time in the past four seasons the two Florida teams have met in the postseason. Each time the winner of that series reached the Stanley Cup Final.

Tampa Bay (46-26-8) will finish second in the Atlantic Division this season and will have home ice-advantage against Florida (47-30-4), which finished third.

The Lightning are led by forward Nikita Kucherov, who leads the NHL with 121 points (37 goals, 84 assists) in 77 games. It’s the third straight season he’s had more than 100 points, including getting an NHL career-high 144 last season, and fifth overall. The Lighting have seven players with at least 20 goals: Brayden Point (42), Jake Guentzel (41), Brandon Hagel (35), Anthony Cirelli (27), Nick Paul (22) and Oliver Bjorkstrand (21). Victor Hedman is sixth among NHL defensemen with 66 points (15 goals, 51 assists).

In goal, they are led by workhorse Andrei Vasilevskiy, who is 37-20-5 with a .921 save percentage and 2.20 goals-against average in 62 starts, the most in the NHL.

The Panthers, who won the Stanley Cup last season, are led by Sam Reinhart, who has 81 points (39 goals, 42 assists) in 79 games. Captain Aleksander Barkov is second with 71 points (20 goals, 51 assists) and Matthew Tkachuk is third with 57 points (22 goals, 35 assists). Tkachuk has not played for Florida since Feb. 8 but is expected back for the postseason. Forward Sam Bennett, who returned Monday after missing four games with an upper-body injury, has 51 points (25 goals, 26 assists). Forward Brad Marchand, acquired by the Panthers from the Boston Bruins at the NHL Trade Deadline on March 7, has 51 points (23 goals, 28 assists). In goal, they are led by Sergei Bobrovsky, who is 33-19-2 with a .906 save percentage and 2.44 GAA in 54 games. Vitek Vanecek is 6-2-3 with a .900 save percentage and 2.66 GAA since arriving in a trade with the San Jose Sharks on March 5.

The Panthers and Lightning split the season series with two wins each. Barkov led the Panthers with three points (two goals, one assist), and Reinhart also scored two goals. Bobrovsky was 1-1-0 against Florida, allowing four goals on 57 shots. Point (three goals, two assists) and Hedman (five assists) each had five points, and Guentzel had four points (two goals, two assists) for the Lightning against the Panthers, with Vasilevskiy going 1-2-0, allowing six goals on 78 shots.

This is the fourth time the Panthers and Lightning have met in the postseason. Tampa Bay won the first two matchups — defeating Florida in six games in the first round in 2021 and then sweeping a second-round series in 2022. Last season, the Panthers won their first-round series in five games.

One of the two teams has represented the Eastern Conference in the Stanley Cup Final the past five seasons, with Tampa Bay going to three straight from 2020-2022, winning it twice and losing in 2022, and Florida going the past two, losing in 2023 before winning the Cup last season.