Florida’s final practice before the holiday break is Monday. The team will then fly to Raleigh, North Carolina, to play the Hurricanes on Tuesday (7 p.m. ET; FDSNSO, SCRIPPS).<\/p>\n
After the holiday break, Florida will play three home games in a span of four days (Dec. 27, 29, 30) before hosting the New York Rangers in the 2026 Discover Winter Classic at loanDepot park on Jan. 2 (8 p.m. ET; HBO MAX, truTV, TNT, SNW, SNO, SNE, TVAS).<\/p>\n
When asked Wednesday by NHL.com if Tkachuk would be ready to play in the Winter Classic, general manager Bill Zito said, “I don’t know.”<\/p>\n
“The prognosis is the same that I said at the beginning of the season,” Zito said. “They told me around Christmas, so I don’t know what that means. He’ll play when he’s ready.”<\/p>\n
Zito said at the start of training camp that the Panthers had hoped to have Tkachuk skating with the team again in mid-December.<\/p>\n
Brady and Matthew were among the first six players named to the United States’ preliminary roster for the Olympic Winter Games Milano Cortina 2026 this February.<\/p>\n
“It was December, January, is what we were told,” Maurice said in November of the initial timeline for Tkachuk’s rehabilitation.<\/p>\n
“It’s an eight-week window, but that’s where these injuries are. He just has to hit a bunch of milestones before he can be pushed. I just can’t say when he will be back with us.”<\/p>\n
In addition to Tkachuk, the Panthers (19-14-2) are without captain Aleksander Barkov<\/a> who had knee surgery after being injured early in training camp and is expected to be out 7-9 months. Forwards Tomas Nosek<\/a> (knee) and Jonah Gadjovich<\/a> (upper body), defenseman Dmitry Kulikov<\/a> (shoulder), and Cole Schwindt<\/a> (broken arm) are also each out long term but could start coming back following the Olympic break at the end of February.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Florida’s final practice before the holiday break is Monday. The team will then fly to Raleigh, North Carolina,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":358754,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[556],"tags":[64,63,575,85],"class_list":{"0":"post-363539","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\/363539","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=363539"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/363539\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/358754"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=363539"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=363539"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=363539"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}