Seth Jones Makes Good First Impression in Florida Panthers Debut

Seth Jones logged 22:56 of time-on-ice while helping the Panthers go 7-for-7 on the penalty kill in his Florida debut on Monday night.

Photo via NHL Network

SUNRISE, Fla. — The Florida Panthers leaned on Seth Jones a lot in his team debut on Monday night — and he delivered in a 2-1 win against the Tampa Bay Lightning.

Jones played 22:56 of total time-on-ice — including 4:06 on the penalty kill — while blocking taking three shots, blocking two shots, throwing a hit and helping the Panthers go 7-for-7 on the penalty kill.

That was all after Jones hopped on a plane from Anaheim to Florida following his trade from the Chicago Blackhawks and had all of one morning skate with the Panthers under his belt before jumping into a rivalry game against Tampa Bay.

“He is going to be really good for us,” coach Paul Maurice said. “He moves the puck clean, and he’s got a set of hands on him.

“I thought for flying from Anaheim to get here and everything being brand new, mostly he’s playing on instinct out there. The East is so much different than the West that I was really pleased with his ability to process and play the game.”

Maurice planned on easing Jones into the lineup after his arrival, opting to play him on the second pairing next to Niko Mikkola while sliding him down to the second power play unit to start.

“We’ll move him into second unit to start,” Maurice said on Monday morning. “Second unit on the power play, won’t come off the bench first on the penalty kill. We just feel there’s so much that he needs to cover and learn in the first 5-on-5 that we don’t want to load him with all of those things. And then we’ll just grow it and see where he gets to.”

Only Monday night’s game turned into trial by fire when Mikkola took two first-period penalties and Jones had to shoulder a good amount of those minutes on the penalty kill.

The Panthers allowed just one high-danger scoring chance during those two first-period penalty kills and it turned into a defensive duel from there.

“There’s two teams come in kind of in the same spot,” Maurice said. They’ve both got a whole bunch of wins and they’ve been doing it in the same way. Their defensive numbers in the last month and a half have been good just like ours. It was a tight game at times and then it just broke open into a huge chance. And then the goaltenders, right? Our penalty killing won us the game. Sergei Bobrovsky’s just a huge part of that.”

Per MoneyPuck, the Jones-Mikkola pairing allowed the fewest expected goals against on the team at 5-on-5 with 0.19 while logging the most 5-on-5 minutes on the team at 15:38.

They held down the fort before Aleksander Barkov was able to score twice in the second period to give the Panthers a lead they would never relinquish.

“He’s a big body who moves the puck well,” Mikkola said. “It was pretty easy to play with him. He is a good skater for his size and has good hands, so it was pretty good. We tried to keep it simple.”

Mikkola and Jones showed the promise the Panthers had hoped to see out of them as two, big, mobile defensemen who can move the puck and up the pressure on the breakout.

“They’ve got really good size, they’ve got really good speed on our back end,” Maurice said. “It just fits.

“There is a value to a guy that can cover ice, kill plays and then start the breakout. It’s how we’re built, it’s the game that we play. We think he’s got the skillset for it.”

It will take some time for Jones to reach his full potential with the Panthers — there always is an adjustment period for players when they are traded from a team like the Blackhawks to a team with a title-contending culture — but he certainly showed flashes of it.

Jones had one of the best scoring chances of the night early in the seocnd period when he drove in on net, picked up his own rebound and got a shot off on his backhand that Andrei Vasilevskiy was just able to stop.

“He’s a good player — everyone knows how good of a player he is.” Barkov said. “I think he fit in right away. From what I know, he loves it here already. We are really lucky and happy to have that type of guy here.”

The offense will come for Jones eventually. The Panthers deployed him for just four seconds on the power play in Monday night’s game, but that will change as he gets more comfortable.

“We’ll get the systems down, he all that other stuff down, which will make him faster,” Maurice said. “He’s a good pro.”