Panthers Pulse: Nate Schmidt Fills a Hole in Search for First Stanley Cup
Veteran defenseman Nate Schmidt will fill a huge hole for the Florida Panthers as he searches for his first career Stanley Cup.
Photo via Da Beauty League
Leading up to the beginning of training camp, Pucks and Palms will be previewing each of the key pieces of the defending Stanley Cup Champion Florida Panthers in a series called ‘Panthers Pulse’ heading into the 2024-25 season. Nate Schmidt is next.
2023-24 Stats: two goals, 14 points, 63 GP (Playoffs: one assist, 3 GP) [Winnipeg Jets]
Hungry for his first Stanley Cup veteran defenseman Nate Schmidt took a pay cut to join the defending champion Florida Panthers.
He’s made plenty of deep playoff runs. He made it to the Stanley Cup Final once and the Western Conference final twice — losing to the Washington Capitals team the Vegas Golden Knights plucked him away from in the expansion draft in 2018.
Schmidt is also very familiar with head coach Paul Maurice, playing for him with the Winnipeg Jets briefly during the 2021-22 season before Maurice’s resignation in December.
Maurice is a big reason why Schmidt is confident this Panthers team can win again. After all, that defensive system that the 33-year-old defenseman spent an entire training camp learning was a big reason why the Panthers shut down the opposing team’s stars and skated off with the Cup.
And Schmidt is capable of adding to it.
He isn’t the most flashy player in the league — his career high in points is 36 and he has never eclipsed the double-digit mark in goals in the NHL — but Schmidt is a shifty 6-foot defenseman who is a plus puck-mover and can hold his own in the defensive zone.
Schmidt is capable of logging a solid chunk of minutes. His career-high is 22:14 minutes per game back during the 2017-18 season where he helped Vegas to the Stanley Cup Final and he most recently logged 16:49 per night on the Jets team which allowed the least amount of goals this year. He logged over 20 minutes in four games for Winnipeg last year.
The Panthers are going to need Schmidt to fill a big hole for them at 5-on-5 with the departures of Brandon Montour and Oliver Ekman-Larsson.
Montour, in particular, led the Panthers in time-on-ice last season, logging over 23 minutes per game. A lot of those reps were on the power play, which will be reinforced by one of Aaron Ekblad, Gustav Forsling or Adam Boqvist, but he and Nikko Mikkola logged a ton of minutes together at even strength.
Schmidt appears to be the favorite to slide in on Mikkola’s pairing heading into training camp.
The 11-year veteran has played in 76 career playoff games throughout seven playoff appearances. He knows what Maurice expects — both firsthand from learning his system and from playing in a ton of intense, playoff-style games throughout his career.
Schmidt is a big hockey guy, too.
Even in the offseason.
He has played in Da Beauty League — an offseason league a ton of NHL players play in during the offseason — for years now, and he’s been a winner there. He’s won the John Scott Cup (their Championship trophy named after the legendary All-Star enforcer) four times, including three times in the past four years.
Schmidt is a guy who loves playing hockey deep into the summer, and he hopes he wins a new piece of hardware in 2025.
Up Next in Panthers Pulse: Tobias Bjornfot
Previously: Matthew Tkachuk, Gustav Forsling, Sam Bennett, Evan Rodrigues, Eetu Luostarinen, Uvis Balinskis, Anton Lundell, Sergei Bobrovsky, Spencer Knight, Aleksander Barkov, Adam Boqvist, A.J. Greer, Sam Reinhart, Niko Mikkola