Panthers give lame excuse

Injuries abound, but their problems run deeper.

Just like last year when they won a playoff round, the Miami Heat are without one quarter of their salary cap in Chris Bosh. Justise Winslow is out for the year. Dion Waiters, Wayne Ellington and Josh McRoberts have missed half the season. Josh Richardson is out again.

“We have enough,” coach Erik Spoelstra keeps saying, even though he’s gone into games with eight players and everyone knows there’s not enough to help a sinking season.

The Miami Dolphins lost two Pro Bowl players this season in center Mike Pouncey and safety Reshad Jones. They lost five of their back-seven defensive starters. Quarterback Ryan Tannehill missed the final month. They made the playoffs.

“We’ve adopted a next-manup mentality,” coach Adam Gase kept saying, which was laudable if not exactly the full story.

The Florida Panthers are hit by injury, too. Their best player, Aleksander Barkov, has missed a quarter of the season so far. First-line wing Jonathan Huberdeau has been out all year, and center Nick Bjugstad and defenseman Alex Petrovic have

missed significant time.

This was the opening answer from general manager and interim coach Tom Rowe after his team’s 4-3 overtime loss Wednesday night in Edmonton:

“We obviously have four major guys out of our lineup, and for us to come here and do what we did and get a point and have a chance to win the game right to the end says an awful lot about our team.”

Six weeks ago, when coach Gerard Gallant was fired, the given reason was inconsistent results. Questions about these injuries were dismissed by the Panthers front office, including Rowe.

“We took everything into consideration at our quarterly meeting,” he said then, “and as a group decided to go in a different direction.”

Now they’re a valiant team despite the same inconsistency? Now injuries are a front-and-center issue to Rowe in a way they previously weren’t?

The Panthers are hurt by injuries. No doubt. You can even measure it analytically. Detroit and Edmonton (245) have lost the most man-games to injury, according to mangameslost.com (yes, there’s a site for everything). The Panthers rank 14th in terms of man-minutes lost.

That hardly tells of the impact of lost stars, though. So, the New York Rangers (19th in overall man-minutes lost) top the list of injury impact to the team based on CORSI (the hockey analytic rating of a player’s talent). The Panthers rank sixth on that list.

That’s fairly high. So, again, they’re hurt by injury. That says last season’s 103 points might not have been attainable even if things were clicking with the roster changes. Which they aren’t.

They haven’t been from the start, either. In the offseason, Rowe was part of the front office that made significant changes to a good team with the stated idea this would take them from a division winner to a Stanley Cup contender.

There’s still time this year. They need to assemble more than the two-game win streak they’ve maxed out at this year. They need to fix the same inconsistency issues that led to the coaching change.

Yes, it would help to get healthy, too. But that’s not the primary problem with this year. Rowe and the assistant general managers who changed this roster must know it. Their moves haven’t worked out so far. They hurt a team rather than helped it.

On a Wednesday teleconference, Rowe was asked about the value of getting the injured players back.

“It would be a great boost for the team,’’ he said. “That being said, we don’t anticipate anyone back real soon.”

Petrovic was labeled the closest to return. Barkov and Huberdeau sounded like early March. They’ll be better with them. But the season’s ideal wasn’t decimated by their loss. Nor will it be solved by their return.

This is the pros. Let fans and media talk of injuries.

Coaches usually don’t give their players a way out by overplaying injuries. They say, as Spoelstra does, the remaining players are enough. They say, as Gase did, it’s a next-man-up mentality.

They don’t say, as Rowe did, how valiant a team is when the results aren’t there.

Dave Hyde