What Panthers learned from a challenging playoff push. And ‘Frozen Four’ MVP joins team
There was a different feeling around FLA Live Arena on Wednesday when the Florida Panthers took the ice for practice. Even if it wasn’t obvious from watching, the Panthers felt lighter after clinching their spot in the 2023 Stanley Cup playoffs a few hours earlier.
“There was an unusual lack of tension,” coach Paul Maurice said Wednesday, “the right amount of lack of tension.”
From 9 points out to the postseason, Panthers clinch playoff spot in final week of season
It was unusual because it was something like whiplash. For more than three months, Florida went into every day feeling it needed to win its next game, while also tracking scores across the league to see just how much ground the Panthers could make up in the postseason race. With one stunning upset by the Blackhawks against the Penguins, all the stress was gone, for at least a few days.
Florida’s challenge now is making sure it doesn’t relax too much.
A year ago, the Panthers saw what can happen when a team coasts into the Stanley Cup playoffs. Florida clinched its spot in the 2022 Stanley Cup playoffs with more than a month left in the season and even locked up the Presidents’ Trophy with a game to spare, then struggled through a six-game series with the Capitals in Round 1 of the postseason.
This year, it took until the last week of the season just for the Panthers to clinch a wild card and they still went into the final game of their regular season with something to play for Thursday, as a win against the Carolina Hurricanes in Sunrise would give them the top wild card and make sure they avoided a first-round series with the league-best Bruins.
“It definitely helps when you are playing that type of game for a while, not just going to playoffs and turn that switch on,” All-Star center Aleksander Barkov said Wednesday. “We’ve been playing hard ... since January or stuff like that. It definitely helps going into the playoffs to know that you have to play a similar type of game to what we’ve been playing.”
There’s one lesson from the last few months of this grueling playoff chase.
The other is in how Florida responded to the nine-point deficit it faced in the winter.
It’s hard to define resilience, but Maurice believes the Panthers displayed it this year and it’s hard to argue.
Center Sam Bennett missed his 12th consecutive game Thursday with a soft tissue injury. Barkov missed 14 games due to injury and illness, and star defenseman Aaron Ekblad missed 11. Neither Sergei Bobrovsky nor Spencer Knight played more than 50 games in the regular season, and fellow goaltender Alex Lyon, who spent most of the season in the American Hockey League, closed out the regular season by starting eight straight.
Even through it all, Florida went into the final day of its regular season only having lost back-to-back games once since the 2023 NHL All-Star Game.
“There was adversity this year, and we had hard games and hard losses, but they handled the adversity and they survived it. And I think they built a team out of themselves through it,” Maurice said. “There’s so much discomfort in the playoffs, from the style of the hockey game, from the pain of the losses, for sure, the emotional swing. We’ve been through that now.”
‘Frozen 4’ MVP joins Panthers
If Mike Benning debuts for the Panthers this year, it won’t be until the Cup playoffs.
If it comes then, he should be well prepared.
The 21-year-old defenseman signed a three-year, entry-level contract with Florida on Wednesday, but wasn’t in the lineup Thursday for the Panthers’ regular-season finale with the Hurricanes, meaning an NHL debut will have to wait until either the 2023-24 NHL season or perhaps the playoffs.
The latter would be so far-fetched, although it would almost certainly require an injury somewhere in Florida’s defense. In recent years, Stars goaltender Jake Oettinger, Avalanche defenseman Cale Makar and even Bennett, when he was playing for the Flames, are a few players to make their NHL debuts in the postseason, and Benning has an impressive playoff resume from his college days: In 2022, he scored the national championship-winning goal for Denver and was named the NCAA tournament’s Most Outstanding Player.
Even in the more likely scenario where he doesn’t debut during these playoffs, Benning, who was a fourth round pick in the 2020 NHL Entry Draft, will get plenty out of his experience in South Florida, just by watching how his new teammates carry themselves.
“For an amateur player who turns pro, that would be the biggest adjustment is this is a full-time job,” Maurice said. “Whether it’s your diet, your sleep habits, all of those things, these guys maximize and they need to to be great.”
