SUNRISE, Fla. — It felt like déja vu in South Florida. There wasn’t any question about it, though; this has happened before.
The sold-out crowd of 19,665 in Amerant Bank Arena roared like their team’s namesake as the Florida Panthers’ second consecutive championship banner rose next to its lookalike earned in 2023-24. It’s one of the loudest venues in the NHL, so surely the road team overheard the ceremony in the locker rooms.
“We’ve put in a couple of hard weeks here and you want to take steps forward. I’ve said this a lot, you’re taking steps in the right direction or you’re not, so we want to take steps forward,” Chicago Blackhawks coach Jeff Blashill said before the game. “When you play really good teams, you get to gauge where you’re at.”
The Hawks have recently been the villains at the home team’s celebration. For the fourth time in the last six seasons, the Hawks have skated past the leftover confetti from a defending champ or a debuting team.
Connor Bedard launched the first shot of the NHL season, one that bounced off the shoulder of goaltender Sergei Bobrovsky. A Frank Nazar breakaway from a Panthers giveaway led to his snipe for the Hawks’ first goal of the season midway through the first period.
The road team gained all of the momentum. Seconds later, it was gone.
A.J. Greer tied it up shortly after. The Hawks found themselves in two penalty kills due to Artyom Levshunov’s penalties, leading to Carter Verhaeghe’s goal. Nick Foligno’s brawl couldn’t stop the Panthers’ breakaways in the first period.
For the next two periods, the Hawks found themselves playing hockey as if they were rostered together for years. The champs once again looked like the team to beat and while they left the building victorious, it wasn’t without a sweat from the visitors.
The Hawks fell to the Panthers 3-2 on opening night of the centennial season and in Blashill’s debut. The back-to-back Stanley Cup champions were without left winger Matthew Tkachuk or team captain Aleksander Barkov.
“We responded in the second and played the type of hockey you have to play to be successful,” Blashill said. “We don’t want to be a team that’s close, we want to find ways to win that game, but that’s part of the growth process.”
The score was 2-2 for the first half of the third period. A Jesper Boqvist shot from a floating Mackie Samoskevich pass led to the Panthers’ go-ahead goal. The road team lost in the shots-on-goal category, but they matched the Panthers in the last two periods.
The Hawks have the third-youngest roster in the NHL behind the Buffalo Sabres and Montreal Canadiens. That included goaltender Spencer Knight (0-1-0), who showed out in his return to Florida.
“You’ve got to play every game, it doesn’t matter who you’re playing,” Knight said. “We can’t focus on who we’re playing … every team in this league is good.”
The veteran presence comes from Foligno and Connor Murphy taking the ice. That’s exactly how general manager Kyle Davidson wants it — for now.
“We’ve got our team that we’re running with right now and we are a young group, but you have to have a bit of a mix there,” Davidson said. “It’s a long season, a lot of new for some of these young players, which can be helped by those veteran guys in the room. It’s a good mix right now.”
Nazar had one of his best nights, pairing his first goal with a pretty assist to Teuvo Teräväinen for his second point of the night. The line with those two and Tyler Bertuzzi created opportunities in the preseason and it has trickled over to the regular season.
“My game throughout the years has always been really well off the rush,” Nazar said. “There are ways to add on to that and there’s things that we can start doing a lot more of.”
The team could be younger, but some skaters are starting their seasons with the Rockford IceHogs. Forwards Oliver Moore and Nolan Allan had impressive camps and seemed to be poised to make the day one roster, but Davidson and company thought differently.
“Something we’ve (Davidson and Blashill) always talked about that I know he’s probably mentioned is there’s a difference between surviving and thriving,” Davidson said. “We want some of these players to thrive and in most cases, that’s some time in the AHL.
“It doesn’t mean you’re there for the rest of the year. They’re there to grow their skill set and grow their understanding of pro hockey, whether it be getting up to speed with the pace of the game, the physicality, the schedule. There’s a lot of things they can learn from time in Rockford, so that’s going to be really beneficial to him. When he does come back, he’s going to be even more prepared to succeed and thrive at the NHL level.”
The Hawks travel to Boston to play the fellow centennial Bruins on Thursday. On Oct. 11, they will play their home opener against the Canadiens at 6 p.m.
Injury updates
- No timetable of return for goaltender Laurent Brossoit, who was designated to injured reserve with a lower-body injury
- Left winger Landon Slaggert should be a “minimum” IR stint, Davidson said.
- Right winger Joey Anderson “shouldn’t be long-term, (should be back) in the next little while,” Davidson said.