It is easier to be the hunters than the Hunted. The Florida Panthers’ motto this season is still #timetohunt, however, other teams will try to get their spots as the defending Stanley Cup Champions try to go back-to-back.
Are the Florida Panthers the Team to Beat This Season?
It is not going to be easy for the Florida Panthers, either. Florida lost several key players on its backend this season, including Oliver Ekman-Larsson and Brandon Montour. On offense, they lost Steven Lorentz, Kevin Stenlund, Ryan Lomberg, and Anthony Stolarz between the pipes.
General Manager Bill Zito kept Sam Reinhart and Anton Lundell on extensions to remain with the Panthers core of Matthew Tkachuk, Aleksander Barkov, Sam Bennett, Aaron Ekblad, Gustav Forsling, and Sergei Bobrovsky. On night one of the regular season, Carter Verhaeghe got his new extension.
Even with this summer’s additions and the season’s expectations, head coach Paul Maurice knows other teams will bring their best every night, especially given the Panthers’ hard style.
So we’ve got, I would say, five teams in our division that we faced in the playoffs over the last two years, and it’s on when the Florida Panthers and the Boston Bruins get together, Maurice said. Like it’s as hard a game as I’ve ever been behind the bench for. So now we’ve got five or six of those teams, but that also leaves three or four teams in our division that teams will get wired up almost last year for our style of game. It’s going to be physical, it’s going to be fast, and then now, I don’t think anybody ever took us lightly, not that we’re that good, but we do play pretty hard.
We already saw through teams that the Bruins and Panthers were in a physical game. But as Maurice explains, there is a history there, especially the last two years in the playoffs. Then, in Ottawa, the Senators were amped up in their home opener to play the defending Stanley Cup Champions.
Will the Florida Panthers Remain Competitive Enough to Repeat?
That is going to be every night, too, and the Florida Panthers will have to be up for the challenge. This season, this club has a different mindset, being the defending Stanley Cup Champions instead of trying to win the ultimate prize.
We have seen different coaches try different strategies. Most famously, Bill Belichick took down the past glory from the hallways after the New England Patriots won the Super Bowl. However, Paul Maurice took a different approach with the Florida Panthers.
We talk about it, we talk about it through day one, and we talk a lot about the adversity that we will face that’s necessary. And I think that that’s poignant to our players over the last two years, Maurice said. Any time, we were in trouble, we were eight or nine points out in January, and we had a really tough schedule in January wasn’t looking good, but the lessons of adversity and the acceptance of adversity, that it’s so hard to win a Cup, to make the playoffs in this league, it’s a challenge, so that you kind of accept it before it happens, accept how hard it’s going to be before it happens. So when you get out there and it’s hard. It doesn’t surprise you.
Well, the Panthers will be dealing with some adversity early on in the season, with Aleksander Barkov out of the lineup after suffering an injury in Florida’s second game late in the third period. Barkov suffered a lower-body injury and could not get off the ice alone. Luckily, he’ll only be out for two to three weeks..
Who is the Biggest Threat to Florida Panthers in the East?
The Panthers will lean on the adversity and lessons learned from dealing with crucial players’ injuries. Remember last year, Brandon Montour (now in Seattle), Aaron Ekblad, and Mathew Tkachuk all dealt with injuries coming into the season. They finally got healthy and found their game.
But Maurice knows that he has to keep his team on level ground and not let their egos get too big, especially after winning the Stanley Cup.
The challenge is to not feel special because of what you did, that somehow this will get slightly easier, because it won’t, not even the littlest amount, Maurice said. So as long as you accept that when it gets hard out there, and we’re down to one in the middle of the game, it’s not the end of the world. That’s exactly where we probably were last year at this time, we figured a way to grind one out.
Don’t expect the Florida Panthers to take a night off; if they do, expect their coach to give it to them. However, as NHLRumors.com has documented, the Panthers are still the class of the Atlantic Division.