Florida Panthers Face ‘Desperate’ Nashville Predators Team in Long Awaited Homecoming

The Florida Panthers are facing a hungry Nashville Predators team after returning home from a two-week road trip — and adversity could be around the corner as they adjust to life after Finland.

In their first home game in nearly three weeks, the Florida Panthers will be facing a pretty unique challenge on Thursday night.

The Nashville Predators had a ton of pressure on them going into this season after signing Steven Stamkos, Jonathan Marchessault and Brady Skjei to reinforce a core that snuck its way into the playoffs last season.

They folded under that pressure so far, sitting tied for the worst record in the NHL to start the season at 4-8-1, and if they do not turn it around soon, general manager Barry Trotz has threatened to begin a plan to rebuild.

After suffering a crippling 3-2 regulation loss to the Washington Capitals on Wednesday night, the Predators are looking to shake it off less than 24 hours later and get their act together.

Going into this game, Florida coach Paul Maurice sees the seeds being planted for a run into playoff contention — adversity that can help a team make a run, just like Florida’s iffy start to the 2022-23 campaign helped ignite a run to the Stanley Cup Final —similar to the 18-game point streak that Nashville rode to the playoffs last year.

“You’re not jealous of what they are going through, but anybody who gets to where they want to get to has to go through some adversity and theirs is obvious and it’s at the start of their season,” Maurice said.

“We come off a trip, they come off a back-to-back, so they have the desperation advantage going into the game today. I saw their defensive zone was hard last night, they are driving hard, and when it gets right and they add that desperation and drive to all of the little details that don’t seem to be working for them, then they are going to go on a run just like they did last year.”

The Panthers are on the opposite end of the desperation/adversity spectrum, having come off of a five-game road trip that ended with a unique two-game set in Finland.

Coming off of that trip is going to be a challenge in itself — to get back into the rhythm of things at home and return to the grind after the Finland trip gave them a change of scenery and routine — and it’s one that doesn’t have a clear answer as to how it will be handled.

The Panthers have a heavy schedule coming up, including games against playoff teams from last season in eight of their next 12 with a two-game set against a New Jersey Devils team rejuvenated by a slew of offseason additions sprinkled in there, and it could present a bit of adversity for them with the change of pace coming off the Finland trip.

Nine of their next 12 games are at home, but even then, they cannot put too much stock in that as they look to shift their mindset back to normal.

“It’s a heavy schedule based on standings, and then after that, I don’t put a lot of faith into ‘Hey, you’re at home, make hey,’” Maurice said. “We’re a good road team, we’ve been on the road a fair amount. I thought when the schedule started this year, I thought it would be a very difficult start for us through the Dallas games, that didn’t necessarily pan out — we did have adversity, but we were able to play well through it.

“So. you know that, in an NHL year, you are going to face adversity at some point. And it might be at a point where you thought it would be favorable because you are at home. We’re playing real good teams, we play tight games, we expect that against the best teams. So, our adversity might be this month.”

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THE NEWS

Sergei Bobrovsky will start in net on Thursday night against the Nashville Predators.

No other changes will be made to the lineup.

Today’s game will air at 7:00 p.m. EST on Scripps Sports and Panthers Plus. It will also be available for streaming on ESPN+ for those outside of the Panthers’ broadcast territory.

For more information on how to catch this afternoon’s game, visit nhl.com/panthers/info/how-to-watch.

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PANTHERS PROJECTED LINEUP

Evan Rodrigues — Aleksander Barkov — Sam Reinhart

Carter Verhaeghe — Sam Bennett — Matthew Tkachuk

Eetu Luostarinen — Anton Lundell — Jesper Boqvist

A.J. Greer — Tomas Nosek — Mackie Samoskevich

Gustav Forsling — Aaron Ekblad

Niko Mikkola — Dmitry Kulikov

Nate Schmidt — Uvis Balinskis

Sergei Bobrovsky

Spencer Knight

Scratched: Adam Boqvist

Injured: Justin Sourdif (SOIR), Jonah Gadjovich (back spasms)

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NASHVILLE PREDATORS PROJECTED LINEUP

Filip Forsberg — Ryan O’Reilly — Steven Stamkos

Jonathan Marchessault — Mark Jankowski — Gustav Nyqvist

Philip Tomasino — Juuso Parssinen — Luke Evangelista

Cole Smith — Michael McCarron — Zachary L’Heureux

Brady Skjei — Roman Josi

Jeremy Lauzon — Alexandre Carrier

Marc Del Gaizo — Luke Schenn

Juuse Saros

Scott Wedgewood

Injured: Colton Sissons, Tommy Novak

(Lines via Alex Daugherty, Tennessean)