A quick glance at the standings in the National Hockey League Friday morning shows the Florida Panthers sitting very nicely in eighth placed in the Eastern Conference. The good news is they are just four points out of fifth place. The bad news is they are only four points ahead of 14th place.

"We have a very little margin for error in our game this season," says Panthers coach Peter DeBoer.

Indeed.

There are many who suggested the only race the Panthers would be in is the race for the first overall pick in the June entry draft. Thus far, that has not been the case. Although the club has had its share of ups and downs, it has been very competitive as of late to the point where you could easily make the suggestion the Panthers are exceeding expectations.

"It really is amazing when you consider where we have been already this year," DeBoer says. "It's only Christmas and already it feels like we have run a marathon."

The Panthers opened the season playing their first two games against the highly touted Chicago Blackhawks in Helsinki, Finland. DeBoer figures it took his young team upwards of five to 10 games to recover from that journey.

Then came debilitating injuries to two of the team's key forwards - veteran Cory Stillman, with a knee, and David Booth who, you will recall, was crushed by a Mike Richards hit in a game against the Philadelphia Flyers Oct. 24 that left him with a severe concussion. Stillman has resumed skating and could play early in the New Year while Booth in only now just doing some light workouts including a little skating. DeBoer has his fingers crossed Booth will be back by mid-January.

Stillman, a two-time Stanley Cup winner with the Tampa Bay Lightning and Carolina Hurricanes, gives the Panthers a consistent scoring threat when he is healthy while Booth, coming off a career-high 31 goals and 60 points last season, was expected to improve on this numbers this year.

"We are on offence-challenged team to begin with," DeBoer says. "To lose guys like that really hurt."

With Stillman and Booth sidelined, others have stepped up to help. Stephen Weiss and Nathan Horton may never be mistaken for Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin or Alexander Ovechkin and Alexander Semin, but they are the Panthers two young guns and lately they have been playing the best hockey of their careers. With 16 goals in his first 35 games this year, Weiss has already matched last year's output and is four off his single-season high of 20. He is on pace for 38 goals. Horton has six goals in his last four games.

"I had Stephen in Plymouth and it was frustrating back then that he wasn't taking his game to a level that I thought he could get to as quickly as I thought he could," DeBoer says. "But now he is really doing that. I sat down with Stephen after last season when he improved to 61 points from 42 the year before and told him I believe he can be an 80-point player in this league. It looks like he's moved up to that level now.

"Nathan has elite talent and is the one guy on our team who is capable of changing the way a game is going on a single shift. When we lost Cory and David, other guys were going to have to dig deep to elevate their games and these two guys have done that."

DeBoer also points to strong goaltending from Tomas Vokoun as a reason for the team's recent surge. That may surprise some since the Panthers are mired in 27th place in goals-against average, hardly anything worthy of bragging, but the coach has an explanation for that.

"We lost five of our defencemen - Jay Bouwmeester, Steve Eminger, Nick Boynton, Jassen Cullimore and Karlis Skarstins - from our rotation last year and Bryan Allan missed the entire year," DeBoer says. "I would say it took us 10 games to get this year's defencemen to get to where they were doing the things we expected from them. From that point on I think we have improved in terms of the number of shots we allow as well as the quality of scoring chances."

The biggest loss, without question, is Bouwmeester who is currently anchoring the defence of the Calgary Flames averaging over 24 minutes per game. The Panthers held on to him at the trade deadline last year, knowing full-well he intended to walk in the summer as an unrestricted free agent. It was a critical error by management who could have moved him for some valuable pieces of the puzzle that surely would have helped the Panthers this year.

"People are seeing just how valuable Bouwmeester is, now that he is playing ahead of great players like Dion Phaneuf and Robyn Regehr in Calgary," DeBoer says. "We really miss him, especially the seven or eight minutes in the final 10 minutes of a game he would play when we were protecting a lead."

With plenty of hockey yet to be played the Panthers will continue to deal with their share of obstacles, but based on what they have accomplished thus far, you'd have top think their odds of success are much better than they appeared out of the gate.