FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. -- Paul Maurice started musing, partly to himself.
“See, that’s an interesting …”
The coach turned then, to an observer, sitting a few rows back in a room in Baptist Health IcePlex, the Florida Panthers’ new practice facility.
“You got your phone with you?” Maurice asked Adelyn Biedenbach, the team’s vice president of communications. “Can you send me a text? ‘Laughter.’”
He turned back, the single-word reminder secured in his phone.
“There you go. That’s what’s missing,” Maurice said. “They’ve been working for a long time and nobody’s made them laugh.”
When the Panthers went on their run last season, from nearly missing the Stanley Cup Playoffs, clinching their spot after Game 81 of the season, all the way to Game 5 of the Stanley Cup Final, before bowing to the Vegas Golden Knights, the team was marked by its can’t-lose attitude, its looseness and lack of pressure, by its laughter on the bench and the exhortations of its coach to enjoy the ride.
That was because, of course, they were playing with house money.
That’s not the case this season.
Florida came into 2023-24 as a Stanley Cup Finalist, albeit one that had its share of doubters, with defensemen Aaron Ekblad and Brandon Montour each having offseason shoulder surgery and there being questions about whether the run was a fluke. The Panthers have proven all those doubters foolhardy, spending much of the season vying to win the Presidents’ Trophy as the team with the NHL’s best regular-season record for the second time in three years.
“I think we’re definitely one of the better teams throughout the League and we’ve shown it throughout the whole season, but we still have that underdog kind of, no, we’re not getting all the credit we think that we deserve so far this year,” forward Matthew Tkachuk said. “I guess, rightly so. We haven’t really proven anything. It’s just the regular season. So we do feel like we’ve played up to our standard for most of the season, but we feel like we can take another step.”
Which is why the Panthers will go into the playoffs driven, with a sense of unfinished business, a sense of purpose and a sense that the Cup could be theirs when the calendar hits June. The Panthers, who won the Atlantic Division in the final regular-season game, start that campaign on Sunday against the Tampa Bay Lightning in Game 1 of the the Eastern Conference First Round (12:30 p.m. ET; ESPN, SN, TVAS) with that awful memory still lingering.
It might sting most for Tkachuk, who fractured his sternum during the Cup Final and missed Game 5.
“It’s brutal. It’s terrible. It still stings,” Tkachuk said, of losing the Final. “But we’re going to get another kick at it here soon.”
Maurice remembers the bitterness finally dissipating, that taste disappearing finally in August. When the team returned. When the new season dawned. When hope replaced devastation.
They reconnected, then. They told the stories, then.
“You’re just using the playoff hockey as your training camp video and you start to remember things that you’d forgotten, so many great things,” Maurice said. “It’s emotionally -- I guess they go hand in hand, physically and emotionally grueling, and when you lose you don’t get a refresh from that. You don’t get the euphoria that comes with it, you’re just kind of left with the numbness at first and, certainly, some sadness.”
But by the end of August, by the time that training camp loomed, that was largely gone. He was excited again. They were excited again. They could see the promise unfolding before them, even with the lingering injury impact of the playoffs the previous season.