📺 Panthers sign new TV deal

In today’s edition:

• 📺 Panthers sign new TV deal

• 🏆 Stanley Cup begins getting Panthers added

• ⏳ Wild hire assistant coach

• 📪 Blackhawks staffers reinstated

• And more!

Panthers sign new TV deal

he Stanley Cup champion Florida Panthers are moving their local broadcasts to Scripps Sports, leaving financially troubled Bally Sports and bringing the club’s games into more homes on a regular basis than ever before.

There will be over-the-air channels in the Miami-Fort Lauderdale, West Palm Beach and Fort Myers markets, where viewers can watch the Panthers for most of their regular-season games and their first-round games in the NHL playoffs. Also part of the deal: games on basic cable and satellite, as well as offerings on a new team-branded, direct-to-consumer streaming app. The app will be ready in October for the start of the 2024-25 season, the Panthers said.

“We want to ensure that we’re addressing the heightened demand for our team and our sport, and we want to accelerate that growth,” Mark Zarthar, the Panthers’ chief strategy officer, said Tuesday. “And so, what is the next big step for us is making the viewership of our games much more accessible? With Scripps as an over-the-air provider, they will help us reach over 2.6 million households.”

The move has already has received NHL approval.

Stanley Cup begins adding newest champs

The Stanley Cup is currently taking a richly deserved breather on Louise St. Jacques’ workbench in Old Montreal, ready this week to once again feel the silversmith’s familiar hammer and metal letter punches.

Within a few days, the historic trophy will include 52 names of Florida Panthers players and staff, the 2023-24 champions joining 58 other teams on the barrel’s five lustrous bands.

“It’s a great part of hockey history,” said Phil Pritchard, the Hockey Hall of Fame curator who’s best known as the white-gloved “Keeper of the Cup.”

The priceless trophy logged more than 12,000 miles between Edmonton and South Florida last month. It then flew out to Las Vegas for the NHL Awards and 2024 Draft before returning to Florida, bar-hopping and celebrated in the Panthers’ raucous victory parade and rally on Sunday.

St. Jacques will first disassemble the trophy, repairing any damage and polishing its silver and nickel alloy. Then she’ll bolt the bottom band to a vise on her workbench, “2023-24 FLORIDA PANTHERS” and 52 names to be carefully hammered -- not engraved -- into hockey history.

Pritchard hopes to return to Montreal next week to reclaim the updated trophy and take it back down to Fort Lauderdale, where celebrations will resume.