It’s been a little while since the Florida Panthers played a game on their home ice.
Sixteen days, five road games and over 10,000 miles have been traveled since the Panthers lost to the Minnesota Wild back on Oct. 22.
That game, as it turns out, was also the last time Florida lost.
The Cats went a perfect 5-0-0 on their extended road trip that saw them beat all three New York teams in their home state before scooting across the pond and defeating the Dallas Stars in both NHL Global Series games played last weekend in Tampere, Finland.
Now they’re back home, where Florida will play their five games, starting on Thursday against the Nashville Predators.
Generally, the first game back home after a long road trip can be challenging.
Whether or not that gets exacerbated with a multi-week, bi-continental roadie is something that Panthers Head Coach Paul Maurice was asked about.
Remember, this was the third time that Maurice coached a team in a pair of NHL regular season games in Finland.
“This one’s an aberration, the first game back after a Global Series game,” Maurice said. “I’m also aware that I have experienced with teams that you didn’t notice a little bit of a lag for almost a week. We came back, you’re all fired up, everything was exciting, and then you got back into the routine of it, and that’s when you…we didn’t necessarily fall off the face the Earth, we had good teams, there was just an energy lag. So we’ll just keep an eye on that, adjust as best we can if we feel they’re short on energy. We’ll tailor what we do on the ice, we’ll find different ways to excite their nervous system, we’ll push them hard off ice, or things like that just to wake them up.”
While the Panthers enter Thursday’s game riding a five-game winning streak and with points in nine of their past 10 (8-1-1), Nashville has found it difficult to find their footing so far this season.
After coming out the gate with five consecutive losses, the Predators now hold a 4-8-1 mark, with only one victory over their past five outings.
Those nine points are good enough for dead last in the Western Conference, one point behind Anaheim and San Jose.
Florida is also catching the Preds on the second night of a back-to-back, with Nashville coming up short on Wednesday night in Washington D.C., losing to the Capitals 3-2 on a third period goal by Alex Ovechkin.
Regarding the goaltenders, expect to see Sergei Bobrovsky between the pipes for the Panthers and Scott Wedgewood for Nashville, after Juuse Saros played Wednesday in D.C.
Here are the Panthers projected lines and for Thursday’s matchup with Nashville:
Evan Rodrigues – Sasha Barkov – Sam Reinhart
Carter Verhaeghe – Sam Bennett – Matthew Tkachuk
Eetu Luostarinen – Anton Lundell – Jesper Boqvist
A.J. Greer – Tomas Nosek – Mackie Samoskevich
Gus Forsling – Aaron Ekblad
Niko Mikkola – Dmitry Kulikov
Nate Schmidt – Uvis Balinskis
Scratches: Jonah Gadjovich, Adam Boqvist
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