As high of the Olympics fades, Panthers back to high urgency as season resumes
The thrill of the 2026 Winter Olympics has come and gone for the hockey world.
And while Team USA will continue to ride the high of its double gold finish — with both the men’s and women’s teams defeating Canada in overtime for the top spot — it’s back to reality for the NHL with the league resuming play this week after a nearly three-week pause for the Olympics.
For the Florida Panthers, that means the final push to try to sneak into the Stanley Cup playoffs and have a chance to win a third consecutive championship is about to begin.
“It’s high urgency,” Panthers defenseman Aaron Ekblad said Sunday, the team’s second day back on the ice following the break. “The guys are really battling hard in practice, trying to make plays, holding onto pucks. Everybody’s gone all out. The thought process here is all systems go.”
It will need to be that way considering the circumstances.
Florida entered the break with a 29-25-3 record. At 61 points, the Panthers are tied for the third-worst record in the Eastern Conference and are eight points back of the Boston Bruins (32-20-5, 69 points) for the Eastern Conference’s final wild card spot with 25 games left to play in 49 days.
Of those remaining 25 games, only 10 are on home ice — including their first two games back at 7 p.m. Thursday against the Toronto Maple Leafs (27-21-9) and 7 p.m. Friday against the Buffalo Sabres (32-19-6) — and no homestand longer than two games. There are six sets of back-to-backs.
“We came back fresh,” Panthers coach Paul Maurice said.
But the Panthers are still far from full strength.
None of their players who have been out long-term — notably defensemen Seth Jones and Dmitry Kulikov along with forwards Jonah Gadjovich and Tomas Nosek (plus captain Aleksander Barkov, who is expected to miss all of the regular season) — are expected to play in the first two games back against Toronto and Buffalo. Kuikov, Nosek and Gadjovich all practiced with the full group on Saturday and Sunday, with Maurice saying a combination of those three could return as early as the Panthers’ road trip next week.
Jones and Barkov have been doing individual drills separate from the main group. The hope for Jones, who has been out since sustaining an upper-body injury at the Winter Classic on Jan. 2, is to transition to noncontact work with the full group by next week.
“At some point,” Maurice said, “we are going to need these players to come back and play for us to give us a chance.”
If not, there could be some interesting roster decisions to be made in the near future.
The NHL trade deadline is 3 p.m. March 6. Florida has five games on its schedule before the deadline to decide what direction it wants to go.
With how far out Florida is from a playoff spot — and with how tight the team’s cap space situation is — being buyers seems unlikely. The Panthers have just more than $2.5 million in cap space, according to Puckpedia, but that doesn’t factor in the $6.5 million that currently is being saved by Jones, Kulikov, Nosek and Gadjovich all being on long-term injured reserve. Florida will need to clear about $4 million to bring all of them back to the roster.
There’s logic in president of hockey operations and general manager Bill Zito deciding to stand pat and see how the rest of the season unfolds, similar to how the Panthers played things in the 2022-23 season when they snuck into the playoff field and made a run to the Stanley Cup Final.
There’s also logic in trying to find potential suitors for depth players to get some assets back in what might ultimately end up as a lost season amid a steady run of success should the Panthers slip in these first few games back and fall further out of contention.
Forwards Evan Rodrigues (a $3 million salary cap hit, under contract through 2026-27), Jesper Boqvist (a $1.5 million salary cap hit, under contract through 2026-27) and AJ Greer (an $850,000 salary cap hit and due for a pay raise following a breakout season as a pending free agent) are logical candidates to be dealt in this scenario. There have been reports about Florida potentially dealing goaltender Sergei Bobrovsky — on the final year of a seven-year, $70 million contract — as well.
For now, though, the team is focused on what it can do to salvage this season while there is still time.
“[It will take] a lot of unity, a lot of persistence, the ability to shake things off if things don’t go our way, but also a need to find a way to get on a run,” Ekblad said. “That’s who we are. We’ll be OK.”
This story was originally published February 23, 2026 at 10:56 AM.
.JPG)