FORT LAUDERDALE — Nate Schmidt arrived in Florida uneasy about starting his tenure with the Panthers.
Florida, coming off the franchise’s first Stanley Cup title, needed to replace a pair of defensemen it lost in the offseason, Oliver Ekman-Larsson and Brandon Montour. Schmidt, who had played under coach Paul Maurice briefly in Winnipeg, was here to fill that void.
“I thought I had it pretty difficult the first couple weeks,” Schmidt said, “being like, ‘How do you find your way with this team that just won? How do you know where you fit in with this group and what you can do to provide? Is it enough? Is it the same that they lost?’
“All those things (are) in your head, until the first couple weeks, you start to settle in, and you get into the system, and then you start to get in and integrate with the guys.”
But Schmidt, at 33 years old, wanted to get back to his old style of play. And he wanted to win. The Panthers gave him a shot to do both. Schmidt has become a big contributor during Florida’s trip back to the Stanley Cup Final, and now that Schmidt is three wins away from lifting the Cup for the first time, Maurice said the veteran defenseman has “found his fun again.”
“I’m so happy for him,” Maurice said. “I think especially because I go back to the kind of conversations we had this summer of what he was looking for from a tour with the Florida Panthers. He’s … not 23 anymore, and he wanted to get his game back. That was the whole point. He felt he was a better player than he was playing, and he took full responsibility for that. There was no blame to anybody else. He just thought he had more to give.
“And it took him probably three or four months to get used to the way that we play, and since that time, he’s been incredibly effective. What I’m most happy for him is especially in Game 1 — (Game 2) as well — but he’s getting up the ice, and he looks like he did when he was a kid, when he first came in the league in Washington. He was dynamic with the way he’d get up the ice, and then coaches beat that out of you and take the fun of the game for you. But he looks like he’s found his fun again.”
It took time for Schmidt, a St. Cloud native and Gophers alum, to get acclimated. He said it took until Florida played Tampa for a pair of games in Finland that he finally felt like he was fully integrated into the squad.
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“What (the coaches) talk about is where you are in our system, how you fit, what your role is, and knowing that it’s okay just to do that,” Schmidt said. “We don’t ask you to do more. So that’s one of the biggest things; I felt once I learned that and understand that that’s good enough, and you don’t have to try and be like, ‘Oh, I need to be playing more. I need to do this. I need to do that.’
“It was like, ‘No, no, you’re right where we need you to be.’”
Schmidt has been exactly what the Panthers need him to be. Not only is he playing well on the ice, he is providing levity off the ice. Maurice called him a “big smile guy.”
“You need those personalities in the room, especially this time of year when games get tighter,” forward Sam Reinhart said. “Nothing changes about him and it’s huge to have personalities like that in the locker room.”
Schmidt has excelled in the first two games of the Stanley Cup Final. He had two assists in a losing effort in Game 1; in that game, hockey analytics website Hockey Stat Card rated him the top player on either team for that game. In Game 2, he added two more assists and earned a 2.24 game score, which was sixth on the team.
“He’s been playing unreal, making some huge plays for us at key moments,” defenseman Gustav Forsling said. He’s been great.”
Schmidt has reached this point in the playoffs before. He reached the Final with Vegas in 2018, scoring three times and notching four assists before the Golden Knights lost to Washington four games to one. But that team, Schmidt said, was happy just advancing through the postseason during their surprise run to the Final. Then in his mid-20s, Schmidt assumed getting to the Final would be a common experience. But it has taken seven years and three team changes to get back. Now he is with a team that expects to be in the Final, and they expect to win.
“When we won the conference final in Vegas, it was a much different feel than what we wanted here,” Schmidt said. “It was like, ‘Guys, this is kind of what this team believes that they are supposed to do. … This is where we’re supposed to be.’”
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