Florida Panthers face a make-or-break week as playoff hopes hang by a thread

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. (AP) — By Friday night, the Florida Panthers will have some answers.

The back-to-back Stanley Cup champions — in desperate need of wins to keep realistic playoff hopes alive — open their post-Olympic schedule on Thursday against Toronto, then play host to Buffalo the next night.

They won’t be in a playoff position when those two games are over. They won’t be mathematically eliminated, either, no matter what happens. But two wins would bring some hope and momentum, while two losses would make already-slim odds probably seem a whole lot longer.

“I think it’s very obvious: It’s a very important week,” Panthers general manager and hockey operations president Bill Zito said. “And it could give us … we may have easy answers or easy questions to answer at the end of it. We may have real difficult ones. I don’t know, but yes, I’ll be watching.”

The odds aren’t good: The Panthers are eight points out of a spot with 25 games remaining. They’re last in the Atlantic Division and need to pass six teams to climb into one of the two wild-card spots in the Eastern Conference.

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“We are in trouble,” Panthers forward Matthew Tkachuk said before the Olympic break.

There are reasons for hope.

Some Panthers did a whole lot of winning over the Olympic break. Tkachuk won a gold medal with USA Hockey at the Milan Cortina Games. Brad Marchand, Sam Reinhart and Sam Bennett won silver medals for Canada. Anton Lundell, Niko Mikkola and Eetu Luostarinen won bronze medals with Finland.

There are hopes that injured players — Seth Jones, Tomas Nosek, Dmitry Kulikov among them — could be back very soon, which would obviously help. And the biggest news came Tuesday, when captain Aleksander Barkov said his recovery from ACL and MCL injuries is going according to plan and that he expects to make his season debut “soon.”

Soon might not be soon enough, but if the Panthers finally get healthy who knows what could happen.

“It’s a veteran team that clearly understands what’s ahead of us,” Panthers coach Paul Maurice said. “We don’t have 25 games left. We’ve got 25 one-games left. Just really narrow your focus and not get ahead of yourself. It’s like a playoff series. You just can’t carry your losses into the next night and there’s no room to take a deep breath after a win. You just cut it off and really focus on the next day.”

The schedule coming down the stretch is daunting, to say the least.

Of the 25 remaining games, in a 49-day span, 15 are on the road. There are two four-game road trips left and a five-game one as well, with no homestand longer than two games the rest of the way. There are five back-to-backs left on the schedule, and there’s not a lot of practice time either.

It will not be easy. And the next two games will absolutely set the tone.

“We need to be comfortable being uncomfortable, and that’s sort of, kind of, a weak parallel on the management side,” Zito said. “Trying to figure out what are we, where are we and why, and then applying that and then making prudent decisions.”

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AP NHL: https://apnews.com/hub/nhl

Tim Reynolds, The Associated Press