FT. LAUDERDALE, Fla. — Gustav Forsling is a cautionary tale for NHL teams. Don’t give up on young defensemen too early.
If you do, you might have to watch from afar as they grow into a player like Forsling, who Florida Panthers teammates say is as steady as anyone they’ve seen and has a body like Adonis.
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The Vancouver Canucks liked Forsling but discarded him after he led all defensemen in scoring in the 2015 world juniors, sending his rights to the Chicago Blackhawks for Adam Clendening, who they felt was closer to contributing.
The Blackhawks gave up on him after just 122 games and three seasons, sending him to the Carolina Hurricanes along with Anton Forsberg for Calvin de Haan and a forward who wound up playing nine NHL games.
The Hurricanes, who had a full allotment of NHL defensemen during the shortened training camp before the pandemic-shortened 2020-21 season, never even gave him a chance, trying to sneak Forsling through waivers before the Panthers snatched him up.
And now, here we are three years and four months since that last move, and Forsling has gone from the scrap heap to the top of the heap, playing big minutes for the Panthers in the playoffs two months after signing an eight-year contract that will kick in next season when he’s 28 — at what sure looks like it will be the bargain sum of $46 million ($5.75 million per season).
“He’s a really great story in the NHL, and I can’t really tell it because I don’t understand all of it,” Panthers coach Paul Maurice said.
Luckily for Maurice, who deploys Forsling, 27, on a defense pair with veteran Aaron Ekblad, 28, the Panthers’ front office had plenty of inside intel on Forsling before he was placed on waivers in January 2021.
Their head coach at the time, Joel Quenneville, and one of their assistants at the time, Ulf Samuelsson, had known Forsling from his Chicago days, when he was taken under the wing his rookie year by Swedish countryman Niklas Hjalmarsson. They gave their endorsement.
That was just for starters. Panthers senior adviser Rick Dudley had previously been the Hurricanes’ senior vice president of hockey operations, and then-Panthers assistant GM Paul Krepelka (now senior VP of hockey operations) had previously been Carolina’s VP of hockey operations. They, too, were each banging their fists to “get this guy,” Panthers general manager Bill Zito told The Athletic.
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“Within the comment part of all of our scouting reports and evaluations of him … it’s all in there,” Zito said. “They were just glowing.”
Forsling had actually first gotten on Zito’s radar when he was still assistant GM in Columbus.
“We had a scout, Blake Geoffrion — I’ve always got to give him credit because he was the first guy I remember talking about him,” Zito said. “It just never really happened there. But then we had so much familiarity with Gustav within our organization once he went on waivers.”
Zito didn’t want to disclose too much inside baseball, but like well-run front offices should, the Panthers scoured teams’ depth charts before that 2021 half-season and had a feeling the Hurricanes would choose to keep Jake Bean over Forsling out of training camp.
The Panthers gave Forsling a shot, and in his first season, he scored 17 points in 43 games and was plus-17. In the three seasons since, Forsling has averaged 11 goals and 39 points. This season, he also led the league with a plus-56 rating, bringing him to plus-133 in the four seasons with the Panthers, the best mark in team history and second in the NHL over that span:
Beyond the basic numbers, Forsling’s analytics show that the Panthers create more shots and scoring chances when he’s on the ice, and score at a higher clip relative to his teammates. A lot of that stems from his steady defensive presence, which helps keep Florida out of its own zone. He’s an aggressive defender at the blue line and uses his size and positioning to keep opponents to the outside in transition to break up scoring opportunities.
“He just doesn’t make mistakes,” Maurice said. “He kills more plays than anybody on our team, and he does it without being overly physical.”
This is why Zito was perfectly comfortable awarding Forsling eight years of stability.
“He’s a guy that doesn’t rest,” Zito said. “(John Tortorella) has a saying with players that get paid. ‘It’s gotten good to him. He’s got his money.’ Trust me, with Gus, he’ll never be one of those guys where it’s ‘gotten good.’”
Forsling was a late bloomer physically.
Now, he’s a physical specimen.
“You should see this guy walking around with his shirt off,” veteran Kyle Okposo said. “He’s like a statue. Truly, he’s a sculpture.”
Added Ekblad, “His body, he’s like a mythical Greek God.”
When the world largely shut down during the COVID-19 pandemic, Forsling returned to his small southern Swedish hometown of Linköping. He went home from March to December “and took advantage of the long, long layoff.”
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“I put in a lot of work in the gym and on the ice, so I think that really helped,” he said. “I knew if I got the chance with Carolina, I was going to be ready.”
He never envisioned it would be with Florida instead.
Now, Forsling is the Panthers’ perennial fitness champ. Zito and Maurice take pride in the Panthers being a physically fit team, and Maurice said Forsling “is our fittest athlete.”
At the team’s annual fitness testing, Zito said, everybody else is competing for second place.
“I remember we were once talking about the testing beforehand, and I made a comment to Gus, ‘A couple of guys here, they’re going to take a run at you this year,’” Zito said. “He looked at me and without cracking a smile goes, ‘Not a chance.’
“I was like, ‘OK, this guy, it’s on.’ And guess what? It wasn’t even close. The second-place guy could be a decathlete or something, and he’d be lapped by Gus.”
Forsling has always taken care of his body but credits veteran Patric Hornqvist for really teaching him how to work out and eat when he got to Florida.
“I really enjoy working out and working hard, so it just comes natural to me to be honest — but I probably needed to eat better,” Forsling said … as he held an arugula salad he was taking from the Panthers practice facility for lunch. “Patric’s a mentor to me and has helped me a lot on and off the ice. But the working out, it’s just me. I’ve got a trainer back home who sets up the program for me during the summers, and my old team lets me work out there and skate there.”
Because of his fitness level, Maurice deploys him in every key situation for the Panthers.
“He was a late bloomer, but it wasn’t from a lack of work ethic,” Maurice said. “He’s our most elite athlete. Our fittest man. A powerful, strong, huge tank. Heavy … and fast.”
On the ice, Forsling is smooth at almost everything.
It’s been impressive to watch during these playoffs, especially the past three games after a rough opening game alongside Ekblad “where we had a look-in-the-mirror moment,” Ekblad said, likely due to the long layoff between the first and second rounds.
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Forsling can hammer the puck, makes a great first pass, is an elite skater and kills plays with his feet and stick.
“Without the puck, he’s probably got one of the best sticks in the world,” veteran Panthers defenseman Oliver Ekman-Larsson said.
Take his bounce-back Game 2 performance: Not only did Florida have a 26-15 shot-attempt edge in Forsling’s minutes, but the quality of the Bruins’ chances was a lowly 0.6 expected goals for, according to Natural Stat Trick. That gap was even greater in Game 3, when Boston only attempted six shots to the Panthers’ 27 with Forsling on the ice, worth an expected goal value of 0.05. Same story in Game 4.
And this despite facing a hefty serving of David Pastrnak throughout the series.
Forsling’s durability has also been notable. He plays through anything, Panthers players say.
“Now that he’s locked up for eight years, we can gush about him a little bit,” Okposo said. “I remember when I got traded here (from Buffalo), I talked to (Sam Reinhart) on everybody and everything, and I asked, ‘Who’s this Forsling guy?’ Reino just said, ‘Wait until you get a look at this guy. He does everything well.’ And he is everything as advertised. I love being on the ice with him because he just kills plays. You’re coming back in your zone in a panic because the other team’s about to get a scoring chance, and next thing you know, he shuts the plays down.
“He never ever, ever, ever puts you in a bad spot as a winger, as a forward. He’s been just absolutely phenomenal.”
Ekblad has never seen anything like it.
“His career has been on that upward trajectory so quickly,” Ekblad said. “I compare him to (Sergei Bobrovsky) in a sense where his preparation is key … whether that’s watching video, or his body in general being absolutely perfect.
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“The consistency in how he prepares his body every day is second to none, so he’s going to be able to play for a long time.”
Maurice said Forsling had to get the details of his game perfect to stay in the NHL. He bought himself time with his work ethic, Maurice said, and the timing for the rest coming together was perfect for the Panthers — right when they got him.
That’s what impresses Ekman-Larsson, who is 18 games short of 1,000. After flaming out with three organizations, many players would have given up on the NHL dream.
But Forsling hung in there and, Ekman-Larsson said, “worked his way up and stuck with it and believed in himself and got a very good chance here to prove he’s a very good hockey player.”
Forsling said he never would have surrendered. While he’s not a self-promoter, he has a quiet, inner confidence. He always envisioned himself in this position where he’d be a top player on his NHL team armed with a stable, lucrative contract. He modeled his game with the Blackhawks after Hjalmarsson, saying, “That’s the kind of guy I wanted to be, but I knew it would be hard to get to that point.”
Ekblad was the No. 1 pick by the Panthers in 2014. He has 676 regular-season and 49 playoff games under his belt.
He knows not every defenseman develops at the same rate, and Forsling — with 397 regular-season and 46 playoff games under his belt — is a perfect example of that.
“I think we’re all in a sense a little bit victim to circumstance and usage and stuff like that,” Ekblad said. “He maybe didn’t just get the opportunities that, say, I got. Teams gave up on him. It took a little bit longer for someone to notice him and give him those opportunities. But once he was given the opportunity to shine, he was able to show what he could do.
“You just need someone to believe in you. That’s the cautionary thought: Believe in the player, give him a chance, give him a true chance.”
— Shayna Goldman contributed to this story.
(Top photo: Minas Panagiotakis / Getty Images)
