Matthew Tkachuk left the Florida Panthers before they play the host Montreal Canadiens tonight. <\/p>\n
He has a very good reason. <\/p>\n
He is about to become a dad. <\/p>\n
Paul Maurice said Tuesday morning that Tkachuk headed back to South Florida to be with his wife Ellie as they await their first child. <\/p>\n
Tkachuk had previously said they are having a son. <\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve had a lot of babies this year,\u2019\u2019 Maurice said Tuesday. <\/p>\n
Tkachuk is the latest member of the Panthers to become a first-time dad, joining Sam Bennett and Carter Verhaeghe to name a few. <\/p>\n
Uvis Balinskis is also about to become a father for the first time. <\/p>\n
Last year, Maurice joked that he hoped his next job would be coach of the Jr. Panthers when all of these youngsters get old enough to play. <\/p>\n
He reiterated that last month when Bennett was absent for the birth of his first child. <\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m going to coach this team as long as I can,\u201d Maurice said, \u201cand then, when these kids get to be around 9, I am going to resign and coach the Jr. Panthers pee-wee Select Team. It\u2019s going to be good. You should see the size of some of these babies. I\u2019m going to wait until Bo Forsling is ready. He\u2019s going to play both sides.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
ON DECK: GAME No. 78<\/p>\n
FLORIDA PANTHERS at MONTREAL CANADIENS\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Matthew Tkachuk left the Florida Panthers before they play the host Montreal Canadiens tonight. He has a very…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":570701,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[66],"tags":[4820,3786,1787,385,99],"class_list":{"0":"post-570700","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nhl","8":"tag-florida-panthers","9":"tag-matthew-tkachuk","10":"tag-montreal-canadiens","11":"tag-nhl","12":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/570700","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=570700"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/570700\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/570701"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=570700"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=570700"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=570700"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}