The robe-wearing Florida Panthers are set to put their latest winning streak on the line Saturday night in Sunrise.
Florida will welcome the Philadelphia Flyers to Amerant Bank Arena for the first matchup of the season between the two.
For the Panthers, the first month of the 2024-25 season has featured plenty of obstacles and bumps in the road.
Injuries to key players and a challenging road schedule haven’t kept Florida from skating to an impressive 10-3-1 record.
Now fully healthy and staying on home ice for couple weeks, the Panthers may really start to turn a corner as they continue to gel and get acclimated to one another.
It certainly helps that several of Florida’s players are riding respective hot streaks.
Captain Sasha Barkov has two goals and 10 points during his current four-game points streak while Sam Reinhart has logged six goals and 10 points over his past five games, scoring in each one, and Matthew Tkachuk has four goals and seven points over his past five games.
As for the Flyers, John Tortorella’s squad is working to turn their season around after a rough first couple weeks.
Philly started the year with just one win over their first seven, but they’ve gone 3-4-0 since and are fresh off a 2-1 shootout win in Tampa on Thursday.
The victory was particularly uplifting because of the strong play in goal from Ivan Fedotov. His first three starts of the season left quite a bit to be desired, and he’d subsequently found himself behind both Samuel Ersson and Aleksi Kolosov on the depth chart.
Ersson’s injury opened the door again, and after a pair of rough starts by Kosolov, Fedotov found himself back between the pipes against the Lightning.
After the 22-save win, it wouldn’t be terribly surprising to see Tortorella roll with Fedotov again and see if he can build some momentum.
In Florida’s crease, the Cats are expected to turn back to Sergei Bobrovsky.
Bob is off to a strong 7-2-1 start to the season, though his underlying statistics (2.97 goals against average, .891 save percentage) leave something to be desired.
Here are the Panthers projected lines and pairings and for Saturday’s battle with Philly:
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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