‘Feel the drive’: Panthers’ focus on full display to newcomers during latest playoff run
For the better part of the past three years, Seth Jones and Brad Marchand watched from a distance as the Florida Panthers built themselves up to a point where they look like perennial Stanley Cup contenders.
And then in early March, the two veterans joined the team at the trade deadline, with Jones coming from the Chicago Blackhawks and Marchand from the Boston Bruins.
They have been fully immersed in the Panther way for about 10 weeks now, receiving a crash course of how to play the team’s grind-it-out style that frustrates opponents before being fully thrust into Florida’s latest playoff run.
How has the experience gone so far?
“It’s a hell of a lot better to be on this side of it,” Jones said with a smile Sunday.
The defenseman spoke after the Panthers’ 6-1 throttling of the Toronto Maple Leafs in Game 7 of their second-round Stanley Cup playoffs series to advance to the Eastern Conference final for a third consecutive season.
Next up for Florida: A best-of-7 series with the Carolina Hurricanes that starts at 8 p.m. Tuesday (TNT, truTV, Max) with a spot in the Stanley Cup Final on the line.
It’s what both Jones and Marchand hoped would come when they joined the team. It’s what the Panthers strove to accomplish when they restocked their roster following their first championship last season.
On paper, it made sense that Florida’s in this position again. It boasts one of the deepest rosters in the NHL and has a veteran goaltender used to playing on this stage.
But from an outsider’s perspective, it was something else about the team that impressed Jones the most once he became part of the group.
“The way that the guys handle themselves every single day, every single practice day, you can feel the drive,” Jones said. “It’s one of the main things that surprised me. It’s easy to be complacent, especially after they won a Cup, and I wasn’t sure how that was going to feel, but coming in, you could just feel the drive to win another one and just be better every single day. Each guy, all the way from our best players — our first line to our fourth line — every guy wants to get better and learn and play for one another. It’s awesome to be a part of. The last few months have been kind of a whirlwind, clearly, for me, and I just wanted to come in and play my game. I’m playing meaningful games, and I’m happy that this organization has believed in me to do that.”
They both have done their part so far through two playoff series.
Jones leads the Panthers in average time on ice (25:45) by more than three minutes and also has six points (three goals, three assists). Marchand is tied for the team lead with 12 points (three goals, nine assists) while also providing a veteran presence and offensive pop to Florida’s third line with center Anton Lundell and left wing Eetu Luostarinen.
“As advertised,” Panthers president of hockey operations and general manager Bill Zito said.
Jones and Marchand can say the same about their new team.
There’s a reason the Panthers are the reigning Stanley Cup champions. There’s a reason they’re still in the mix to make it back to the Stanley Cup Final for a third consecutive year.
They use their experience, trials and tribulations to simultaneously stay true to the identity they’ve created over the past few years yet also continue to elevate their game to another level.
“I think because we’ve won, a lot of people think, ‘Oh, you won, you’ll just kind of rest on it, right?’ No,” defenseman Aaron Ekblad told the Miami Herald. “We have that hunger. To get back here [to the Eastern Conference final] three years in a row is extremely difficult. It takes new guys coming into the lineup and having huge effect like Jonesy and Marchy and guys like that. And it takes guys like Barky [captain Aleksander Barkov], Chucky [star winger Matthew Tkachuk], myself, Reino [forward Sam Reinhart], I go through the whole lineup to all chip in on a nightly basis and have some heroic efforts. So, yeah, it’s, it’s a true testament to up and down our lineup, front office, coaching everyone doing their job on a daily basis to get us this point.”
Those learned experiences are ingrained in the team’s core and has been extended to newcomers as soon as they join the room. It’s why the magnitude of the moment wasn’t too big for them on Sunday. Their season was on the line in a winner-take-all Game 7 against Toronto. After falling behind 0-2 in the series, Florida rattled off three consecutive wins but couldn’t failed to close out the series in their first attempt with a 2-0 loss in Game 6 on home ice.
Yes, it meant playing a Game 7.
But the Panthers had played in bigger moments over the past three years.
They rallied back from a 3-1 series deficit against Marchand’s Bruins in the opening round of the 2023 playoffs for one of the NHL’s biggest postseason upsets — a team that barely scratched into the playoffs knocking off the team with the NHL’s best regular season ever — on their way to their eventually reaching the Stanley Cup Final where an injury-riddled roster lost in five games to the Vegas Golden Knights.
They nearly lost in the Cup Final again last year after blowing a 3-0 series lead to the Edmonton Oilers and needing a heroic Game 7 to win the franchise’s first championship.
So Sunday, while a pivotal game, in essence like just another game.
And they played like it. No loss of composure. No frustration. No angst.
Just a prototypical Panthers performance.
After a scoreless first period in which both sides had their share of chances, Florida scored three times in a six-and-a-half minute span in the second period to take control and then never let their foot off the gas after that.
“We have a ton of belief in the system that we play and the depth of our group and the experience in these moments,” Marchand said. “Going through it before, it’s invaluable experience when you go through moments like this and you’ve been through these moments before. A lot of guys on the team have won Cups. When you win a Cup and you play in some of the games that this team played in last year? These are not high-pressure games. When you’re playing for an actual Cup and you give up a three-game lead and then you’re in Game 7? That’s a high-pressure game. So, now, Game 7, second round, yeah, it’s a high-pressure game, but it’s not compared to some other games that guys have played.”
The way they prepare set them up for success. Panthers coach Paul Maurice always preaching that the team needs to prepare for a playoff series as if it’s going to go Game 7. It mentally prepares them to endure for whatever might come.
“If the core foundation of your game is the simplest things, it doesn’t matter how your hands feel, it doesn’t matter how your body feels, it doesn’t matter how well you execute, if it’s how comfortable you are in hard situations, then you have a chance,” Maurice said Sunday. “We talk about Game 7 in training camp. We want to play a style of game that gives us a chance to win. It gave us a chance to win.”
It gave them a chance to advance and keep their goal of repeating as Stanley Cup champions alive.
But there’s no rest for this team. It’s already on to the next challenge. Less than 48 hours after wrapping up one series, the next begins in Carolina.
This story was originally published May 19, 2025 at 4:08 PM.
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