The 36 or so hours since the Florida Panthers lost the 2023 Stanley Cup Final to the Golden Knights could only ease the pain so much. There are still moments — quite a few each day since the Panthers lost Game 5 on Tuesday — when the realization will hit Paul Maurice and he’ll be miffed all over again, maybe blurt out an expletive and then get back to whatever he was doing, and the coach knows he’s not the only one.
Florida got so tantalizingly close to hoisting its first Stanley Cup and now has to wait another year for another shot.
“We had a fantastic experience and that definitely helps, but it could also be challenging,” star goaltender Sergei Bobrovsky said. “The next season, it starts from zero.”
The days since the Panthers’ season ended with a 9-3 loss in Las Vegas have been filled with about every emotion imaginable.
There’s grief at the season ending and appreciation for all they went through to get to the Stanley Cup Final. There’s frustration about how close they came and how long they now need to wait, and optimism about what next season might look like. They’re in very literal physical pain — four players have broken bones and multiple skaters could miss the start of the 2023-24 NHL season due to injuries — and also exhausted, eager to refresh and get ready for another run at the Cup in 2024.
Of the 20 players to suit up for Florida in the final game of the Cup Final, 15 are under contract for next year and all but two are still in their 20s.
“Nothing is guaranteed,” superstar right wing Matthew Tkachuk said, “but we know that we have guys in the age range that if we do all the right things, we can hopefully give ourselves a chance at playoffs for a bunch of years and see what happens.”
The Panthers will go into next season with an interesting set of expectations.
In the regular season, Florida was mediocre this year, finishing with only the 17th-best record in the NHL — one team from the Western Conference had a better record than the Panthers and didn’t even make the postseason — and only qualified for the 2023 Stanley Cup playoffs in the final week of the regular season.
In the playoffs, Florida turned into a juggernaut, upsetting the Presidents’ Trophy-winning Bruins in seven games, and then tearing through the Maple Leafs and Hurricanes in just nine combined games before losing to the Golden Knights in the Final.
If the Panthers are the team everyone saw in the Stanley Cup playoffs, they will be one of the championship favorites. If they’re the team everyone saw for six months of the regular season, they will struggle just to get to the postseason again. There’s even one track, Maurice cautioned, where both could be true.
For now, Florida feels like a contender, though, and it’s partially because of what happened last year. The Panthers’ regular season was shocking because they were the defending Presidents’ Trophy winners and coming off the two best regular seasons, in terms of points percentage, in franchise history. They were supposed to be one of the best teams in the league and weren’t until the calendar flipped to April and then they did everything Florida expected.
“We got there and we competed, and everything kind of fell into place and we bought into a system that we know can win,” star defenseman Aaron Ekblad said, explaining why he thinks the playoff version of the Panthers were the real version of what this team is. “We didn’t get the job done, but we know we can do it. That kind of belief, I think, is going to be really important for us moving forward.”
Florida has $10 million in cap space to work with this offseason and only four everyday players — defensemen Radko Gudas and Marc Staal, and centers Colin White and Eric Staal — to try to replace. The Panthers will get to rebuild their defense, which was a bit thin this year after they dealt star defenseman MacKenzie Weegar to the Flames as part of the Tkachuk trade, and flesh out the depth they could’ve used when injuries piled up throughout the Cup playoffs.
Some of those injuries could keep players out for the start of next year, too. Ekblad needs shoulder surgery and doesn’t expect to be ready for October, he said, and Maurice expects at least one more player to miss at least the start of training camp because of an injury.
Tkachuk, however, should be OK for the start of the season after he fractured his sternum in Game 3 of the Final last Thursday.
Those injuries, as well as a short offseason, mean Florida probably won’t be close to 100 percent when the 2023-24 season begins. As excited as they already are for the near future, the Panthers are trying to keep this in mind.
“Everything’s scratched,” Bobrovsky said. “We have to compete for the playoff spot again and do all the things from zero, and be humble doing that.”
