Deja Vu? Panthers Face Adversity on Same Schedule as Last Season

The Florida Panthers have entered a big patch of adversity near the end of the season. That just so happened to occur last year. Here’s what they learned then and what they can learn now.

The Florida Panthers have hit one of their biggest patches of adversity of the season — and it is coming at a not-to-dissimilar spot as it did last season.

Florida is 1-3-0 in its past four games and enters its gauntlet of a stretch run with seven match-ups with hungry teams on the Eastern Conference wild card bubble and four games against bonafide playoff contenders left on the schedule.

They will be without Matthew Tkachuk, Aaron Ekblad and Dmitry Kulikov for a large chunk of those games. Brad Marchand will be a reinforcement to the lineup at some point, but he has an injury of his own he needs to return from.

Flashback to last year, the Panthers lost six of eight games (2-5-1) to close out the month of March while Ekblad, Aleksander Barkov, and later Carter Verhaeghe in April, all missed varying amounts of time during that stretch.

So, what did the Panthers learn back then and what can they learn now?