Panthers pounce in NHL opener win
AP, RALEIGH, North Carolina
The Carolina Hurricanes on Tuesday gathered at the blue line, the Stanley Cup sitting on a table a few meters away, and watched a championship banner rise to the rafters amid roaring home fans.
From the visiting bench, the Florida Panthers — the team that had won the Cup the two years before Carolina’s June breakthrough — patiently waited through that 15-minute ceremony to remind everyone that they are fully back from an injury-hammered year.
It added up to a tight-checking, goaltender-dominated and sometimes testy reunion between title winners with playoff history between them.
The Florida Panthers’ Aleksander Barkov, center, battles for the puck between the Carolina Hurricanes’ Jordan Staal, left, and Nikolaj Ehlers during the third period of their NHL game in Raleigh, North Carolina, on Tuesday.
Photo: AP
It took a blue-liner in Gustav Forsling to finally end it by blasting a one-timer past Brandon Bussi with 4.3 seconds left in overtime that pushed the Panthers to a 1-0 season-opening win.
“Playoff-style hockey,” Forsling said. “That felt like a playoff game to me. It was awesome, really fun.”
The NHL said it marked the third time in its modern era (since 1943-44) that the two previous Cup winners met in a season-opening game, the others coming in 1962-63 and 2019-20.
The Panthers had reached the Stanley Cup Final for three straight years and won it all in 2024 and last year, twice eliminating the Hurricanes in the Eastern Conference Final in that run. However, injuries last year derailed any chance to contend, notably with captain Aleksander Barkov going down with a knee injury to open preseason camp.
Getting Barkov back, along with Panthers star Matthew Tkachuk welcoming brother Brady Tkachuk as an offseason addition to an already deep lineup, had offered plenty of reason to believe Florida is back among the league’s best. They also brought in Jacob Markstrom to take over the crease anchored by Sergei Bobrovsky during those title runs.
That is why Florida coach Paul Maurice pointed out it is a new team, even with so many championship holdovers, and why the Panthers sat on the bench to watch the Hurricanes’ pregame ceremony.
“You get a chance to see what you want so bad,” Maurice said. “We think it’s really important that the teams respect each other for those achievements, whether it’s an individual player hitting a milestone or certainly a Stanley Cup. They’ve earned the right to have as long of a ceremony as they wanted, and it was well done.”
Elsewhere, the Vancouver Canucks edged the Edmonton Oilers 6-5 in overtime, while the Boston Bruins blanked the New York Rangers 3-0, the Montreal Canadiens pipped the Toronto Maple Leafs 3-2 and the Vegas Golden Knights defeated the Chicago Blackhawks 5-2.
KioskNews shows a cleaned-up reading view extracted from the publisher’s page — the original always lives on their site, not ours.