The Florida Panthers are high on young defenseman Mikulas Hovorka. <\/p>\n
On Wednesday, they signed the 25-year-old to a one-year, two-way contract for the upcoming season. <\/p>\n
Hovorka has spent the past two seasons in the Panthers organization after Florida discovered him playing in the same pro league in Czechia that Uvis Balinskis was. <\/p>\n
The 6-foot-6 righthanded shot spent his first North American pro season with the Charlotte Checkers, but Hovorka made his NHL debut with the Panthers last February and played four games with Florida. <\/p>\n
\u201cI got the call and then I couldn\u2019t fall asleep, I was so excited to get here,\u2019\u2019 Hovorka said after making his debut against the Lightning before the Olympic break. <\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s definitely a dream come true. I was thinking about all the hard work that went in to get here and I would like to thank everyone who helped me along the way.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was a long journey since I first hit the ice. I\u2019m still a little overwhelmed by it.\u2019\u2019<\/p>\n
The Panthers wanted to keep him in Charlotte to continue getting more big minutes and an expanded role with the Checkers. <\/p>\n
Hovorka went from having three goals and 10 points in his first AHL season to five goals and 18 last year. <\/p>\n
The Panthers currently have seven NHL defensemen coming to camp with Hovorka and Donovan Sebrango likely competing for the next open spot.<\/p>\n
Florida could also bring in a veteran NHL defenseman on a PTO to add more competition for the final roster spots. <\/p>\n<\/p>\n
ON DECK: FLORIDA PANTHERS\u00a0OFFSEASON<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Florida Panthers are high on young defenseman Mikulas Hovorka. On Wednesday, they signed the 25-year-old to a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":629306,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5102],"tags":[2135,62,57,5141,5,61501,4,63,260],"class_list":["post-629305","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-florida-panthers","tag-charlotte-checkers","tag-florida","tag-florida-panthers","tag-floridapanthers","tag-hockey","tag-mikulas-hovorka","tag-nhl","tag-panthers","tag-uvis-balinskis"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nhl\/116969185171870279","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/629305","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=629305"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/629305\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/629306"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=629305"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=629305"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=629305"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}