Key additions and subtractions
In terms of years and dollars, the Panthers biggest addition this offseason was winger Evan Rodrigues, who got four years and $12 million from general manager Bill Zito. Rodrigues is coming off his best two seasons in the NHL, producing 19 goals and 43 points for Pittsburgh in 2021-22, and 16 goals and 39 points in 69 games for Colorado last season. Blessed with a high-quality shot, the 30-year-old, who might start the season on Aleksander Barkov’s line, will be counted on to replace the offense that Anthony Duclair provided (when healthy) after the speedy “Duke” was traded to the San Jose Sharks on July 1.
I’ll stick with forwards to mention the Panthers also made a point to bolster its fourth line by bringing in a pair of 27-year-olds in Kevin Stenlund and Steven Lorentz, who was part of that Duclair trade, to replace the departed Eric Staal and Colin White. The towering Stenlund is a former second-round pick who has played 151 NHL games since being drafted by Columbus in 2015. Lorentz plays with that chip on his shoulder one would expect from a seventh-round pick. Lorentz has stood out in training camp and exhibition games.
The blue line is where most of Zito’s efforts went during the offseason. Not only did he have to replace beloved hit-machine Radko Gudas, who went west to Anaheim in free agency, the club also chose to move on from grizzled, low-priced veteran Marc Staal, and will enter the season without the services of Aaron Ekblad and Brandon Montour, who were injured during the playoffs and are expected to be out until December.
Enter a bevy of new blueliners to help fill the breach, starting with Niko Mikkola, who was the only addition on the back end to get more than one year from the team. While not the thumper that Gudas is, Mikkola, 27, is a defensive defenseman who looks to be entering his prime years. He is signed through the 2025-26 season with a cap hit of $2.5 million.
The Cats are also giving former star defenseman Oliver Ekman-Larsson a chance to resurrect his standing. After a couple of subpar seasons in Vancouver led to the Canucks buying out the final four years of his pricey contract, Ekman-Larsson signed a one-year, $2.25 million deal to come to South Florida. With Montour and Ekblad out, OEL is expected to quarterback the first power-play unit. In hopefully a sign off things to come, he had three assists in his preseason debut.
Also inked to identical one-year, $1 million contracts to help plug the gap until December were the well-traveled Dmitry Kulikov, a former Panther first-rounder, and Mike Reilly, who found himself bumped down to AHL by all the defensive depth in Boston last year after playing 70 games for that club in 2021-22.
After watching journeyman Alex Lyon play a monumental role in getting the club to the playoffs and starting three postseason games, Zito brought in another experienced and capable veteran goaltender in Anthony Stolarz to replace him on the depth chart. Depending on how the Cats handle Spencer Knight’s return from the NHL/NHLPA Players’ Assistance Program, the former Duck could find himself backing up Sergei Bobrovsky to start the season.
Strengths/weaknesses
The Panthers greatest strength remains their ability to put the puck in the net. Despite switching coaches and systems after winning the Presidents’ Trophy in 2021-22, the Cats came in sixth in the league in scoring utilizing Paul Maurice’s quantity over quality approach to offense and finished top-five in shot, scoring chance and goal generation at five-on-five. Florida iced two 40-goal scorers in Carter Verhaeghe (42) and Matthew Tkachuk (40); Sam Reinhart eclipsed the 30 mark for the second straight time since being acquired from Buffalo in July of 2021 and the team had nine others player hit double-digits, topped by Aleksander Barkov’s 23 and including Brandon Montour’s 16 from the blue line. The outbursts from Verhaeghe and Montour were career-highs. Given the team’s skill level, the power play can frustrate at times, but they still finished tenth in the league at 22.8%. The addition of Rodrigues and Ekman-Larsson plus more than 68 games from Barkov could lead to improvement in that area once Montour and Ekblad return from injured reserve.
Goaltending could be another area of strength if 35-year-old Sergei Bobrovsky can keep the clock turned back to Columbus time. After four seasons of being consistently inconsistent since signing his monster contract to join the Cats on July 1, 2019, Bobrovsky took the reins back from Alex Lyon in Game 4 of Florida’s first round series against Boston and proceeded to go 12-6 with a 2.78 goals-against average, .915 save percentage and one shutout in 19 postseason games. Along with Tkachuk, Bobrovsky was the biggest reason why the Panthers were able to knock out Toronto and Carolina before they ran out of gas and healthy bodies in the Stanley Cup Final loss to Vegas. 2019 first-rounder Spencer Knight’s preseason play has been promising since he returned from the NHL/NHL Players’ Association player assistance program. Anthony Stolarz, who went 5-6-0 with a 3.73 GAA and .899 save percentage in 19 games with lowly Anaheim last season, was inked to a one-year contract as very competent insurance policy to replace Lyon, who is now a member of the Detroit Red Wings.
Florida’s biggest weakness this season is tied to the injuries and departures on defense, which could hamper the club’s ability to play consistent, winning hockey, especially during the early stages of the 2023-24 campaign. Injuries and inconsistency were an issue last season, as the Panthers failed to take advantage of a soft start to the schedule and sputtered until January. I’m not going to discount how well the team played once the calendar turned to 2023, but the reality is they squeaked into the playoffs and needed a heroic turn from Alex Lyon and a late season collapse by the Penguins to help them do so. This season, they will have to overcome starting off without two of their top four defensemen, in addition to the permanent loss of a human wrecking ball in Radko Gudas. The addition of veterans Mikkola, Ekman-Larsson, Kulikov and Reilly should help hold the fort, but those players may have to play above where they should slot in for an extended period of time and none of that group currently boasts the offensive prowess of Montour and Ekblad or the physicality of Gudas.
Biggest questions
How will the Panthers defense look without Aaron Ekblad and Brandon Montour?
The cost of last year’s run to the Stanley Cup Final is about to be paid in full for the Panthers. After playing with significant injuries during the playoffs, two of the Cats’ top producers and most relied upon defensemen, Aaron Ekblad and Brandon Montour, are slated to miss multiple months while recovering from offseason surgery. To compound the issue, Ekblad and Montour are both right-handed. With Radko Gudas and Marc Staal leaving via free agency, Paul Maurice is without two thirds, including the entire right side, of the blueline that hoisted the Prince Wales Trophy as Eastern Conference champions last May to start this season.
Bill Zito went to work this summer and brought in four NHL veteran defensemen. Niko Mikkola was signed to a multi-year contract and brings a shutdown mentality with good size, reach, and skating. Oliver Ekman-Larsson is a capable offensive defensemen looking to re-establish himself after a poor stint in Vancouver the last two seasons. Dmitry Kulikov returns to the organization that drafted him and is a versatile depth defenseman and Mike Reilly is trying to prove he belongs in the NHL after spending most of last season with Boston’s AHL affiliate.
However, Ekblad and Montour accounted for over 37% of the total ice time from Panther defenders last year and the top six of Ekblad, Montour, Gudas, Staal, Gustav Forsling, and Josh Mahura combined to miss just 23 total man-games. With the Atlantic Division shaping up to be one of the most competitive races in the NHL, Maurice is going to have to find a cohesive unit from the defensive group quickly. Lost points in October and November could determine if the Cats are playing in late April.
Which Sergei Bobrovsky will the Panthers get?
In 2022-23, Sergei Bobrovsky essentially lost the starting goaltending position at the most critical time of the year. Fueled by a miracle run in net by Alex Lyon, the Panthers went into a series against the heavily favored Boston Bruins with $10 million on the backup bench. But, when down 3-1 in the series, Bobrovsky helped breathe new life into the Cats and sparked a legendary comeback and fairy tale run to the Stanley Cup Final.
While Bobrovsky’s play might give hope to some Panthers fans, the 35-year-old Russian netminder has been wildly inconsistent since signing a massive seven-year, $70 million contract. In the last four years, Bobrovsky’s save percentage (.906) ranks 28th amongst NHL goaltenders (minimum 4,000 TOI). His high-danger save percentage is eighth over that same stretch, but he has the second-worst in the league against low danger shots. Already on the downside of his career and with three more seasons on an albatross contract, the Panthers have only seen glimpses of a Vezina Trophy form from Bobrovsky.
Star players
On July 22, 2022 the Panthers made a franchise-altering move by trading leading scorer Jonathan Huberdeau, defenseman MacKenzie Weegar, prospect Cole Schwindt, and a first-round pick in 2025 for Matthew Tkachuk. Fraught with the risk, the move couldn’t have worked out any better. Armed with a new eight-year, $76 million contract, Tkachuk went off for 40 goals and led the team with 69 assists and a 109 points while appearing in 79 of 82 regular season games. His assist and point totals were both career-highs. Tkachuk was the first player in twenty years to record 40+ goals, 5o+ assists, and 120+ PIM. He was a finalist for the Hart Memorial Trophy and even took MVP honors at 2023 All-Star Game on home ice in Sunrise. Providing that “edge” that has been sorely missing the last few years in the postseason, Tkachuk, amassed 11 goals and 13 assists in 20 playoff games, notching four goals including three game winners in the sweep of the Carolina Hurricanes in the Eastern Conference Finals, before suffering a fractured sternum in Game 3 of the Stanley Cup Final. Tkachuk has the ability to score often and in timely fashion, delivering big goals when his team needs it the most. Combine that with his pinpoint passing and agitating nature and you have a player that is very, very difficult for opponents to deal with.
As the Panthers’ first choice (second overall) in the 2013 draft, Aleksander Barkov took a different route to Sunrise than fellow star Tkachuk. After ten seasons in the league, Florida’s quiet captain is widely-lauded as one of the NHL’s most complete players. Barkov’s scoring took a very slight dip in 2022-23, but he still averaged over a point-per-game (78 in 68 games) for the third straight season. Barkov accumulates his points while taking on the top competition from the other side on a nightly basis and remains the club’s best faceoff option. With 243 goals and 631 points in 664 career games, Barkov is already the franchise leader in those two categories and should surpass Huberdeau’s 415 assists sometime in early 2024. With a Lady Byng Memorial Trophy and Frank J. Selke Trophy to his credit, Barkov has literally done it all, on both ends of the ice, in career that still has a long way to go for this two-way threat.
He might not get a lot of attention in the press or be a star yet, but he certainly seems to be bubbling under. A part-time player for the Tampa Bay Lightning during its Stanley Cup run in 2020, Carter Verhaeghe came to the Panthers as an unrestricted free agent that summer after not receiving a qualifying offer from the Bolts. Since joining the club three seasons ago, he has gone from 18 to 24 to a team-leading 42 goals in 2022-23. Dangerous off the rush, Verhaeghe possesses a wicked wrist shot and a flair for the dramatic. He led the Cats in playoff scoring with 12 points in 2022, and his overtime goal in Game 6 against the Washington Capitals gave the Panthers its first playoff series win since 1996. He bagged another series-winner this past season, eliminating the mighty Bruins in overtime of Game 7 to spark the Panthers mad dash to the Stanley Cup Final. Firmly in his prime scoring years, Verhaeghe has a legitimated shot at becoming the first Panther since Pavel Bure to hit 50 goals in a season.
Under the radar player who could have an impact
Every year that Bill Zito has been at the helm of the Panthers, previously unheralded players have been provided with an organizational opportunity or plucked from other franchises only to grow into important pieces for the Cats. Carter Verhaeghe, Gustav Forsling, Eetu Luostarinen, Alex Wennberg, Sam Bennett, Chris Driedger, and Mason Marchment have all benefitted in recent years.
For 2023-24, there are no shortage of options with Zito having once again been frugal and opportunistic in free agency. Certainly, Evan Rodrigues is poised to deliver a career year playing alongside elite point producers like Aleksander Barkov and Matthew Tkachuk. On the blueline, Oliver Ekman-Larsson and Mike Reilly are on one-year “prove-it” contracts and will be motivated for a chance to re-establish themselves.
But, it’s hulking forward Steven Lorentz that seems perfectly tailored for Paul Maurice’s preferred style of play. At 6-4, 216 pounds, Lorentz skates very well and can play both wing and center. Going into this season with just 80 games of NHL experience and at age 27, Lorentz will get the best opportunity of his career to win a regular spot in the lineup. His reach, size, and speed make him an ideal fit for Maurice’s design on the forecheck and emphasis along the walls. Lorentz may not dent the scoreboard as much as Verhaeghe or Marchment did during their breakout seasons, but his imposing size and physicality has been sorely needed in Florida’s bottom six. Lorentz has been working on the penalty kill during the preseason and, if he can stay in that rotation, the capability to shave a few difficult minutes off the workload of guys like Barkov and Reinhart will go a long way to making the Panthers a much deeper team.
Key rookie
Mackie Samoskevich, Florida’s first round choice in 2021, is generating plenty of buzz during training camp. The 20-year-old scored twice and added an assist in the Panthers preseason opener versus Nashville and chipped in two assists against Ottawa at the Hockeyville Canada game nationally broadcast by NHL Network. After making deep cuts to the roster for the final week of camp, Samoskevich got a look as the third on a line with Matthew Tkachuk and Sam Bennett. Heady stuff for the team’s top prospect who went from ten goals as freshman to twenty goals in his sophomore season with the Michigan Wolverines, and got his feet wet professionally with the AHL’s Charlotte Checkers after leaving college. Paul Maurice is usually not one for young players, but Samoskevich’s skill, speed and shot may result in a spot on the opening night roster.
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