The Panthers are finally healthy, just in time for a Cup run. Here’s how they’ll line up
The Florida Panthers lined up for their annual team photograph Thursday and Keith Yandle quipped about the sheer size of the group the Panthers were trying to organize.
“We said it before: They’re going to have to have the wide-lens camera today,” the defenseman said. “It was probably the biggest one I’ve been a part of, for sure.”
Three different goaltenders have started multiple games for Florida and 36 different skaters have played at least once in the 2020-21 NHL season.
On Monday, the Panthers played five different rookies in their 5-4, overtime win against the Dallas Stars — a game with legitimate playoff-seeding implications — and coach Joel Quenneville promptly yanked three of them off the active roster ahead of Florida’s season-ending, two-game series against the Tampa Bay Lightning on Saturday and Monday.
After so much lineup juggling throughout the final two months, the Panthers are finally as healthy as they’re going to be and it’s just in time for a run at the Stanley Cup.
Forwards Carter Verhaeghe, Patric Hornqvist and Sam Bennett all returned to practice Thursday at the BB&T Center after missing time with upper-body injuries.
Verhaeghe has missed 12 games in a row. Hornqivst has missed five. Bennett sat out Monday, too, to manage his own injury and backup goaltender Chris Driedger, who has the eighth best save percentage in the NHL, is also set to start Monday after he missed the last four games with a lower-body injury.
For the first time since Florida landed Bennett at the trade deadline in April, the Panthers expect to send out their full-strength roster Saturday as they try to get ready for 2021 Stanley Cup playoffs. Quenneville had a host of options to sort through when putting his lines together.
“You get [Hornqvist] back, all of a sudden you’ve got Hags back and [Mason Marchment] just coming back, so the lines get a little bit of an adjustment,” Quenneville said, “but it seems like most of the lines have two pieces together and off of that they get reacquainted real quick.”
In practice, Verhaeghe returned right to the top line, playing left wing next to star center Aleksander Barkov and fellow winger Anthony Duclair. Bennett returned to his post as the second-line center, in between All-Star left wing Huberdeau and rookie right wing Owen Tippett. Hornqvist, who spent some time next to Barkov prior to his injury last month, is now the third-line right wing, next to forward Alex Wennberg and fellow winger Frank Vatrano.
The fourth line has left wing Ryan Lomberg and Marchment surrounding forward Noel Acciari.
It means winger Nikita Gusev, who has played in 10 of 11 games since joining Florida as a free agent just before the deadline, is on the outside looking in, as is rookie center Eetu Luostarinen, who has played 44 games this year.
Rookie right wing Grigori Denisenko is also just outside the main lineup, despite scoring points in his last four games while playing on the top line with Barkov.
Rookie Spencer Knight is also third in the goaltender pecking order, Quenneville said.
“It looks like that could be the playoff look, but it’s a situation where the nice thing is that you need depth,” Quenneville said. “You need a lot of things to go your way come playoff time. And having some guys get some turns and some opportunities to play in some critical situations, and some big moments and they handled it, so that was a good thing for us as an organization.
“I like our lines. I like the balance in them.”
The final two games of the regular season will have modest playoff implications — the difference between home-ice advantage in a likely first-round series against the Lightning.
The Panthers can no longer catch the first-place Carolina Hurricanes and the Hurricanes need just three points in their last three games to clinch the Central Division title.
In all likelihood, Florida will meet Tampa Bay in the first round of the Stanley Cup playoffs and the Panthers can take home ice by sweeping the two-game series with at least one regulation win, even if the Lightning beats the Stars on Friday to move two points ahead of Florida.
“It’s to find our game and obviously if we play them, we’re going to play them a lot,” Huberdeau said. “The last two games, we’ve got to be at our best to get into the playoffs.”
