The Panthers have gone 11-14-0 since and come into tonight\u2019s game against Jones\u2019 former Columbus Blue Jackets 11 points behind the Boston Bruins with 18 games remaining.<\/p>\n
Jones, of course, was not Florida\u2019s first star player to go down to injury this season \u2014 and he was not the last.<\/p>\n
Florida started the season knowing that Matthew Tkachuk would miss a big chunk of the season, so would Tomas Nosek.<\/p>\n
Then captain Sasha Barkov went down on his first day of training camp needing reconstructive knee surgery.<\/p>\n
Dmitry Kulikov, Cole Schwindt, Brad Marchand, Jonah Gadjovich, and others missed significant time as well.<\/p>\n
But Jones\u2019 injury seems to have marked the final direction of how this Florida Panthers season would go.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe proverbial straw,\u2019\u2019 Paul Maurice said. \u201cYou take the dominant man up front \u2014 and, he and Niko Mikkola, at times, in the playoffs were the dominant pair \u2014 that seems to be the straw. There was there, then stacked on that was nine games in 15 days.\u2019\u2019<\/p>\n
Jones, acquired from the Blackhawks in a blockbuster deal last March, is a very important piece to how the Panthers play.<\/p>\n
That was apparent during the playoffs when he and Mikkola became a fantastic pair once Aaron Ekblad returned from suspensions and went back with Gus Forsling.<\/p>\n
It certainly shows now that he has been out.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen you look at our analytics after that,\u2019\u2019 Maurice said, \u201cit was extreme over the bar, positive 5-on-5. That got narrowed down into a very thin band with only a couple of exceptions.\u201d<\/p>\n
The timing of the injury was not good for the Panthers \u2014 nor Jones.<\/p>\n
![\"Get](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/Get-FHN.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"FORT LAUDERDALE \u2014 The Florida Panthers were a point out of the Stanley Cup playoffs on Jan. 2…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":104300,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[28,30,29],"class_list":["post-188557","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-florida","tag-florida","tag-florida-headlines","tag-florida-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/188557","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=188557"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/188557\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/104300"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=188557"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=188557"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=188557"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}