As ‘long’ Panthers offseason nears midpoint, reinforcements add excitement for season
It has been two-and-a-half months since the Florida Panthers last played a hockey game, since their 2025-26 season unceremoniously ended on April 15 without a playoff berth and without a chance to potentially win a third consecutive Stanley Cup.
There’s still about another three months until the 2026-27 season starts.
They’re not used to this type of waiting. Not after three consecutive trips to the Stanley Cup Final including a pair of championships, three consecutive short offseasons, three consecutive seasons showing that they have become one of the NHL’s top teams.
“It’s a long time,” forward Eetu Luostarinen said.
The extra time has its benefits. Florida missed the playoffs because of an injury-ravaged campaign, one that saw eight players miss at least 25 games and another six get shut down before the season officially ended. Getting five-plus months to heal before the start of another grueling season will almost assuredly help the Panthers get back on track.
But it also adds to the anticipation as the Panthers attempt to show that last season was a fluke, that they are still contenders.
“There are long offseasons with no hope and no belief, and there are long off season with plenty of those things,” defenseman Aaron Ekblad said, “and I think we have them both and a lot of will and competitiveness still in our team. I don’t think anybody’s sounding any alarms here. We’re just going through the process of getting ourselves ready to play.”
Florida’s core remains intact. After Luostarinen signed an eight-year contract extension on Wednesday and fan favorite Radko Gudas returned to the team on a six-year deal after a three-year stint with the Anaheim Ducks, the Panthers have 13 players signed through at least the 2029-30 season.
But that didn’t stop Panthers president of hockey operations and general manager Bill Zito from swinging big this offseason. The Panthers’ roster improvement began with a bang when they traded for Ottawa Senators star forward Brady Tkachuk, brother of Matthew Tkachuk, in a deal that sent three first-round picks and four picks total the other way.
They followed that up by trading with the Philadelphia Flyers for forward Garnet Hathaway, who adds another layer of physicality to Florida’s group up front. They then replaced their entire goaltending tandem, trading for Jacob Markstrom and Akira Schmid after Sergei Bobrovsky and Daniil Tarasov both became free agents.
Florida rounded out free agency with several depth signings to provide competition for training camp.
It was Zito’s latest message: The Panthers might have been out for one season, but they aren’t going anywhere.
It also has Zito, just like the team he’s assembled, itching for the start of the season.
“I’m gonna get killed for saying this,” Zito said, “but [I’m looking forward to seeing] the aura of our space. It wasn’t a great year, and watching the playoffs was hard and not real happy. There weren’t a lot of smiles around here, and it was going to be a long, hard summer. I think now there’s the spirit of the feeling, that intangible sort of environmental feeling that ‘Yeah, it’s on’ and ‘God, the boys are back.’ Everybody’s ready to go on any given day. The gym is packed with guys working out. It just seems like a little bit of a zip, a little life.
“Coach likes to use the word juice, so I’ll say there’s some juice now. It’s starting to flow.”
This is who the Panthers are. They don’t accept anything less than success. They understand how talented and stacked their roster is at full strength, something they were never a year ago. They began the 2025-26 season knowing Matthew Tkachuk was going to miss half the season while recovering from the torn adductor muscle and sports hernia he played through during the Stanley Cup playoffs. And then captain Aleksander Barkov tore the ACL and MCL in his right knee on his first day of training camp, which ended their top player’s season before it could begin.
The hits kept coming from there. Defenseman Dmitry Kulikov’s shoulder. Forward Jonah Gadjovich’s neck. Defenseman Seth Jones’ collarbone. Forward Sam Reinhart’s foot. Forward Brad Marchand’s slew of lower-body injuries.
Even with that, the Panthers stayed in the playoff hunt for nearly two-thirds of the season until they ran out of steam.
Now, they have a clean slate with a set of reinforcements who are ready to put them back over the top again.
“The goal is 100% set,” said Gudas, who was one of Zito’s first free agent signings before the 2021 season and was on the first Panthers team that reached the Cup Final in 2023 but wasn’t here for either of the championships in 2024 and 2025. “We’re just looking for this cherry on the top.”
Added Markstrom, who was drafted by Florida in 2008 and was with the team as a backup goaltender through the 2013-14 trade deadline: “Their runs the last three or four years has been second to none. ... It’s going to be a tough team to play against.”
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