{"id":852178,"date":"2026-08-12T03:50:09","date_gmt":"2026-08-12T03:50:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/852178\/"},"modified":"2026-08-12T03:50:09","modified_gmt":"2026-08-12T03:50:09","slug":"inside-look-at-florida-panthers-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/852178\/","title":{"rendered":"Inside look at Florida Panthers"},"content":{"rendered":"

Adding Brady, who had 59 points (22 goals, 37 assists) in 60 games last season, Eller and Hathaway to a forward group that includes Barkov, Matthew\u00a0and fellow returnees Sam Reinhart<\/a>, Sam Bennett<\/a>,\u00a0Brad Marchand<\/a>, Carter Verhaeghe<\/a>, Anton Lundell<\/a>\u00a0and Eetu Luostarinen<\/a>\u00a0gives Florida depth up front that Zito said “can match up historically with any of our teams.”<\/p>\n

The biggest change is Markstrom, who began his NHL career in Florida (2011-2014), returning to succeed Sergei Bobrovsky<\/a>\u00a0as the No. 1 goalie. A cornerstone of the Cup teams, Bobrovsky signed with the Toronto Maple Leafs after playing seven seasons with the Panthers.<\/p>\n

“I think everyone that’s there wants the same thing,” Markstrom said. “We all want to win again and that’s the same mindset and same goal as I (have) now also.”<\/p>\n

It will help that the Panthers are expected to be fully healthy for the start of training camp, according to Zito. Their lengthy list of injuries last season included Barkov, Matthew\u00a0(surgery for torn adductor muscle, sports hernia), Marchand (lower body), Verhaeghe (lower body), Bennett (lower body) and defensemen\u00a0Seth Jones<\/a> (upper body, broken foot), Dmitry Kulikov<\/a> (shoulder surgery, broken nose, broken finger), Niko Mikkola<\/a> (knee), Gustav Forsling<\/a> (undisclosed) and Uvis Balinskis<\/a>\u00a0(fractured foot).<\/p>\n

Although Barkov didn’t play in the NHL last season, he led Finland to the gold medal at the 2026 IIHF World Championship in May with a team-high 11 points (three goals, eight assists) in 10 games. He’ll be hungry on opening night along with the rest of the returning Panthers.\u00a0<\/p>\n

“It’s already been a long summer for us,” Luostarinen said. “I’m sure everybody wants to get back out there and play.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Adding Brady, who had 59 points (22 goals, 37 assists) in 60 games last season, Eller and Hathaway…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":852179,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[556],"tags":[64,63,575,85],"class_list":["post-852178","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nhl","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-nhl","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/852178","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=852178"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/852178\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/852179"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=852178"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=852178"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=852178"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}