Why Oliver Ekman-Larsson thinks Florida is the perfect place for a bounce-back season
At only 32 and with a pair of appearances in NHL All-Star Games still not so far in his past, Oliver Ekman-Larsson insists the player he was in the last two seasons for the Canucks is not what the Florida Panthers are getting after signing him to a one-year deal July 1.
There were injuries — two breaks in the same foot in the past 14 months — and the challenge of being an accomplished veteran on a bad team. There are no excuses to make, he said, and so he has never minced words about his two years in Vancouver.
“It’s been two rough years,” the Swedish defenseman said.
It’s why he chose to sign a one-year, $2.25 million contract with the Panthers when free agency opened earlier this month. What better place is there to try to bounce back than Florida, where the expectation now is to be playing deep into the Stanley Cup playoffs every year?
“I want to win and I want to play for a long time during the year, so I think that was kind of the decision,” Ekman-Larsson said. “They’ve got a lot of good hockey players, plus a lot of depth on the team. I’ve only heard a lot of good things.”
After their run to the 2023 Stanley Cup Final last month, the Panthers emerged as a destination where established veterans want to play and where troubled players look for another chance.
Usually, those have been younger players looking for an opportunity to break out — examples include defenseman Gustav Forsling and left wing Carter Verhaeghe — but Ekman-Larsson, who was an All-Star in 2015 and 2018, sees a similarly favorable situation as a veteran.
Last year, Ekman-Larsson was the Canucks’ third-highest-paid player, expected to be a top-pairing defenseman, and Vancouver wound up buying him out last month because it couldn’t justifying paying his annual $8.25 million salary.
In Florida, he will get the best of all situations.
To start next year, he will have to play an important role, with star defenseman Aaron Ekblad and Brandon Montour both expected to miss the start of the season due to injuries sustained during the 2023 Stanley Cup playoffs. By the end of the season, he could easily slide back into a lower-responsibility supporting role, perhaps as a third-pairing defenseman.
“Everything came into play,” Ekman-Larsson said. “You kind of look through the lineup and I think I can help the Panthers a lot. I think I can do that even when they’re back and that’s why I wanted to sign there because you want to have a good team, and I think when those guys are coming back, it’s going to be a really good team. I just hope that I can help the team.”
The clearest role he has to play at the start of the season is on the power play.
Ekblad and Montour played 83.5 percent of all power-play minutes last year among Florida defenseman and Forsling was the only other defenseman to average more than a minute of power-play time on ice per game. Ekman-Larsson, even in the worst two-season stretch of his career, averaged 1:33 on the power play last year and 1:45 the year before.
“I’m just going to try to do what I can to help the team win hockey games,” Ekman-Larsson said.
Most importantly, Ekman-Larsson is as healthy as he has been since his first year with the Canucks, when he was still a completely serviceable defenseman.
He first broke his left foot while playing for Sweden in the 2022 IIHF World Championship, then said he broke it again — it was, at the time, reported as a sprained ankle — in February, cutting short his final season in Vancouver.
The initial break meant he couldn’t do much skating or running last offseason and it left him “behind the eight-ball” for training camp, he said, and he “never caught up.”
This offseason already has been different. Ekman-Larsson has been on the ice since June and believes it will make a difference next season.
“I don’t want to make that as an excuse, but when you’re not able to do what you’re supposed to do in the summer, you kind of come behind from the start and have to work really hard to even get back to feeling good. I think that’s going to help me a lot,” he said. “I’m really pumped about having a really good offseason.”
