The good news is that the Panthers still have a lot of guys, and they know how to play under Maurice, who is starting his fourth season in Florida.<\/p>\n
Of the 19 players on the ice Wednesday, 15 appeared in the Cup Final last season. That included goalie Sergei Bobrovsky<\/a>; defensemen Aaron Ekblad<\/a>, Gustav Forsling<\/a> and Seth Jones<\/a>; and forwards Sam Bennett<\/a>, Anton Lundell<\/a>, Brad Marchand<\/a>, Sam Reinhart<\/a> and Carter Verhaeghe<\/a>. That\u2019s still not too shabby.<\/p>\n Of the four who didn\u2019t appear in the Cup Final last season, two have plenty of experience with the Panthers. Defenseman Uvis Balinskis<\/a> played 76 games in the regular season and five in the playoffs last season. Forward Mackie Samoskevich<\/a> played 72 games in the regular season and four in the playoffs.<\/p>\n The only newcomers were forward Luke Kunin<\/a> and defenseman Jeff Petry<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cI just think we have a deep squad, and everyone knows the system and buys into the system, and that\u2019s the key,\u201d Forsling said.<\/p>\n Ekblad said that \u201cbringing intensity to the system every night\u201d is the challenge.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s easier said than done, but it\u2019s our job to bring it,\u201d he said. \u201cThere\u2019s a lot of veteran leadership in this room that understands how to bring it and when to bring it. Yeah, I think obviously there\u2019s points in an 82-game season where you\u2019re not going to have it or you\u2019re going to have an injury or something where you can\u2019t do everything possible, but you\u2019re still trying to do as much as you can any given night.\u201d<\/p>\n There is a misconception, at least on the outside.<\/p>\n \u201cWe don\u2019t peak for the playoffs,\u201d Maurice said. \u201cThat\u2019s not what we\u2019re trying to do. As a matter of fact, it\u2019s the opposite. You look at our last two Marches, they are uninspiring.\u201d<\/p>\n The Panthers had a 1-5-1 slump in March in 2023-24. They went 4-8-1 from March 11 to April 6 last season.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re just trying to play as hard as we can so that when we get to the playoffs, we have invested enough hard that you don\u2019t want to let it slip away,\u201d Maurice said. \u201cThe idea of timing it, it doesn\u2019t work for us. We wouldn\u2019t be able to do that, certainly now. None of these guys are going to be back for five months, so no sense waiting.\u201d<\/p>\n There is nothing positive about playing without Barkov, Tkachuk and company, unless the Panthers can learn to win without them.<\/p>\n \u201cThe silver lining is, you potentially become bulletproof to injuries in the playoffs if you can figure out how to survive this now,\u201d Maurice said. \u201cThat\u2019s the only thing we get out of this, because we\u2019re going to have to scratch and claw to make the playoffs, because the division is that good.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The good news is that the Panthers still have a lot of guys, and they know how to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":217047,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[556],"tags":[64,63,575,85],"class_list":{"0":"post-217046","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nhl","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-nhl","11":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217046","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=217046"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217046\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/217047"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=217046"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=217046"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=217046"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}