The Associated Press Toronto Maple Leafs left wing Nicholas Robertson (89) defends against Florida Panthers left wing Sandis Vilmanis in a recent game.

NEWARK, N.J. — A decade has passed since the Toronto Maple Leafs missed the playoffs, their nine-year streak the longest going in the NHL.

The Florida Panthers are back-to-back Stanley Cup champions who have made three consecutive trips to the final while qualifying in each of the past six seasons.

Unless something shockingly rare happens, neither one of the Eastern Conference mainstays will make it this spring, with lofty expectations derailed by major absences.

Toronto has seemingly never recovered from Mitch Marner not returning as a free agent and doing a sign-and-trade with Vegas to salvage some value for the perennial point-a-game-plus producer. Florida has been ravaged by injuries, no one more significant than captain Aleksander Barkov’s torn right ACL that has sidelined the do-it-all first-line center since training camp.

“The burden hasn’t gotten heavier,” Panthers coach Paul Maurice said. “We’ve just had fewer men to shoulder it.”

With a quarter of the schedule left to go, players on either side are quick to point out there is a lot of hockey left. But the trade deadline is Friday, and each of these teams is expected to be a seller.

That is incredibly unfamiliar territory for a couple of contenders used to their general managers buying this time of year. Instead, players are skating on eggshells wondering what’s coming next.

“I don’t go sit around and talk to every guy (about) what they’re thinking, but they’re obviously thinking about it — it’s natural,” Leafs coach Craig Berube said. “The deadline’s around the corner here and there’s a lot of talk and noise, but you’ve got to block it out.”

Also being blocked out is how much of a herculean effort it would take to make up ground. Only eight teams in each conference get in. Toronto is sitting 13th and Florida 14th out of 16.

“This is a daunting task,” said Panthers winger Matthew Tkachuk, who missed the first 47 games after surgery to repair a sports hernia and a torn adductor muscle and didn’t debut until Jan. 19. “We all know it. I mean, we know the points that we have to get in with. Ultimately, it’s probably going to be higher than the normal in the East. And there’s a lot of teams ahead of us.”

Columbus, Washington, Ottawa and Philadelphia are all ahead in the standings and also on the outside looking in. Toronto is nine points back of the second and final wild-card spot with 21 games to play and Florida 10 back.

Panthers forward Tomas Nosek, who on Tuesday night played his first game since the Cup final last June after undergoing offseason knee surgery, said he and his teammates “cannot look at the math. When you start looking at the math, you’re gone.”

The Maple Leafs, who have not had long postseason runs like the Panthers but also have made the playoffs every year since Auston Matthews broke into the league, are not yet ready to publicly discuss what blew this season horribly off course.

“You can look at a lot of different factors,” Matthews said. “I’m not going to sit here and speculate on what went wrong.”

Elsewhere:

– The Utah Mammoth made a splash trade Wednesday by getting defenseman MacKenzie Weegar from Calgary for three second-round picks in the draft this year, Olli Maatta and unsigned prospect Jonathan Castagna.

– The Dallas Stars acquired defenseman Tyler Myers from the Vancouver Canucks on Wednesday in exchange for a 2027 second-round pick and a 2029 fourth-rounder. Vancouver is retaining half of Myers’ $3 million salary for the remainder of this season and next, meaning the Stars get him at a modest $1.5 million hit for two possible playoff runs.

– The Washington Capitals signed forward Ethen Frank to a two-year, $4 million contract extension.