Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Hyde: This really is Panthers’ year
With Cup-savvy coach, Barkov entering prime, franchise’s time is now
No team does offseasons like the Florida
Panthers. No team produces such feel-good headlines only to have them go splat from the opening game.
“Tell me about it, I know,” team president Matt Caldwell said.
No team talks playoffs only to miss the playoffs.
“There’s no more excuses,” center Aleksander Barkov said. “I think we’re a really good team right now. We just have to do it on the ice.”
This is all why it’s scary to write no team is positioned better to save South Florida from infernal sports damnation, from the ugly rebuild to the treadmill of mediocrity, than the Panthers right now.
They’re the hope for the hopeless as they begin preseason practice on Friday. The idea isn’t so much that this is the Panthers’ year to do something. That’s been said for most of the past decade or two. The Panthers are the Dolphins of the NHL in that regard.
The idea this year comes with an ultimatum:
If they don’t win this year, they never will.
Every ingredient is in place. This offseason reads like a winning shopping list. They got the Hall of Fame coach everyone wanted, Joel Quenneville. They got the goalie everyone wanted, Sergei Bobrovsky. They sprinkled in successful veterans and good role players.
“Everything worked exactly the way we planned,” Caldwell said.
Even the piece that didn’t work, Artemi Panarin signing with the New York Rangers, actually works for them. General Manager Dale Tallon admitted signing the highscoring Panarin would have involved “marketability and scoring” more than rounding out a full roster.
“I think we exceeded them,” Tallon said of offseason hopes. “It’s never easy to get who you want. We thought we’d get the two top names, but as the negotiations we on we elected to go in a different direction and that’s to get depth. That’s what we really needed.”
It’s all there then, except of course, the results.
“That was my message to the team,” Tallon said. “‘Let’s stop talking and start acting.”
In 2016, the Panthers made the playoffs for the second time since 2000 and expected to build on it. They fell apart the next year. Two years ago, they had a great second half to close within a point of the playoffs. They fell apart last season.
No excuses? Well, the youthful core of this team isn’t so youthful anymore. All of them have played at least five years with the Panthers and are in the prime of careers. Go down the lineup of ages.
Barkov, 24.
Vincent Trocheck, 26. Jonathan Huberdeau,
26.
Aaron Ekblad, 23.
“It feels like I came here for the first time yesterday,” Barkov said. “Now I’m starting seven years here. You’ve got to enjoy it while it lasts.”
Quenneville’s first challenge is to shore up a bad defense. Bobrovsky, a twotime Vezina Trophy winner as the league’s top goalie, certainly helps after a year when age, injury and a franchise forever wasting his talent caught up with Hall of Famer Roberto Luongo.
Last year, defenseman Mike Matheson had a league-high 135 turnovers. Ekblad had 122 and Keith Yandle had 110. No wonder Tallon signed defenseman Anton Stralman from Tampa Bay. He committed fewer than 30 turnovers each of the past three seasons despite playing more than 20 minutes a game.
See how this works? See why Tallon says he’s finally got a team ready to win?
“We’ve got the pieces in place,” he said.
Two more roster-rounding pieces: Veteran free agents Brett Connolly and Noel Acciari. They won’t make headlines. They know their roles, though. As Acciari said, he wants to play well enough to allow the Barkovs and Trochecks play a few minutes less each game. Minutes that matter in a game and even more over a full season.
“At the end of the day, our goal is to win the Stanley Cup,” Bobrovsky said.
Whoa. Did he really say that? The Panthers as champs? Can you imagine?
In a sport of often random success — St. Louis went from last place in January to Stanley Cup champs in June — the Panthers have been a hallmark of consistency. They’ve made the playoffs twice in 18 years. They haven’t advanced in the playoffs since 1996.
They should do each this year.
Or it’s fair to wonder if they ever will.