‘Way better than we thought’: Panthers think they dodged bullet after Ekblad injury scare
Andrew Brunette, Jonathan Huberdeau and just about everyone else associated with the Florida Panthers couldn’t help but get flashbacks to last year when they saw Aaron Ekblad crawling around on the ice in the first periods of the Panthers’ 3-0 win against the Anaheim Ducks on Thursday.
The good news for the Panthers is their deepest concerns only lasted a few hours. By the end of the game, Brunette got “positive news” on the outlook for his star defenseman.
“We’re very hopeful,” the interim coach said Friday. “It was way better than we thought it was going to be. We’ll get a better idea tomorrow, but good news.”
The actual incident was scary: With 18:55 left in the first period, Ducks defenseman Cam Fowler collided with Ekblad against the boards and star center Aleksander Barkov, who lost his footing near the play, slid feet first into the two skaters. Ekblad’s right knee buckled in the three-player pile up, a skirmish broke out and Ekblad was left crawling around on the ice, unable to get back up to his feet.
Eventually, trainers came out and helped Ekblad get up. Even then, he couldn’t put any weight on his right leg. At the first intermission, Florida ruled out the 26-year-old Canadian with a lower-body injury.
Brunette said Ekblad had tests done before the end of the game, though, and they showed “nothing structural” with Ekblad’s injury. Florida (42-14-6) planned to reevaluate him Saturday and the hope is he will only be out “short term.”
“It’ll be a clearer picture tomorrow of exactly what it is,” Brunette said.
Even if the injury keeps Ekblad out for some period of time, the prognosis is way better than last year, when Ekblad fractured his left ankle and missed the final two months of the season, including the entirety of the Panthers’ brief run in the 2021 Stanley Cup playoffs.
“It’s not last year,” Brunette said. “He’s going to be OK.”
This injury scare came almost exactly a year after his last one. Last year, Ekblad’s skate got caught in the corner between the boards and the ice in a road win against the Dallas Stars and his left ankle snapped, forcing Florida’s training staff to stretcher him off the ice with an air cast around his leg.
Even though he was able to hop off the Honda Center ice without a stretcher Friday, the incident felt similar with the Panthers once again contending for a Stanley Cup and Ekblad playing at a James Norris Memorial Trophy level, with 57 points and the fourth most defensive win shares in the NHL.
“When you see that,” Brunette said, “you just think, exactly: last year.”
Said Huberdeau: “You see him go down and you think it’s like last year, and he’s going to be out for the rest and then the playoffs.”
The specifics of how long he’ll be out aren’t clear yet, but the schedule breaks nicely for Florida. The Panthers don’t play again until Thursday when they go back on the road to face the Montreal Canadiens. They have time to let Ekblad, star goaltender Sergei Bobrovsky, rookie center Anton Lundell and right wing Patric Hornqvist get healthy after all were sidelined by injuries or illness by the end of the four-game West Coast swing.
Florida also has the luxury of a two-point lead on the Carolina Hurricanes for first place in the Eastern Conference and a six-point lead on the Tampa Bay Lightning for first place in the Atlantic Division. With 20 games to go, the Panthers have all but locked up their postseason spot and will be able to shift their focus to the Cup playoffs soon.
For now, they still want to make a run at the Presidents’ Trophy and the top seed in the East.
“It’ll give us a few days to reset and go,” Brunette said of the five-day break. “Hopefully, they’re back in the lineup.”
