Panthers trade pipeline has a history
Luongo reminds us how often players have gone from Florida to Vancouver
As the migrating Canada goose flies, it is 4,495 kilometres from Sunrise, Fla., to Vancouver, which is about the same distance as South Florida to Greenland or La Paz, which is in Bolivia.
No two National Hockey League franchises are farther apart than the Vancouver Canucks and the Florida Panthers, and yet they exchange players as easily as neighbours sending sugar or garden tools across their backyard fence.
We are reminded of this by the return tonight — only 11 years since his trade to Vancouver and three years since his return to Florida — of goalie Roberto Luongo to face the Canucks.
The Panthers’ lineup also includes Jared McCann, the little centre that couldn’t for the Canucks, who traded him and a second-round pick to Florida last spring for defenceman Erik Gudbranson. Gudbranson, alas, is injured and out indefinitely, so we can’t possibly judge the trade over the course of one game tonight, although many will try.
Panthers GM Tom Rowe had been on the job about 15 minutes when he sent Gudbranson to the Canucks on May 25.
Somewhat remarkably, there hasn’t been a Florida-Vancouver trade since then, although Rowe has been busy coaching last season’s 103-point team to a 9-8-8 record since his ham-handed firing of Gerard Gallant in November.
Rowe is the eighth Florida GM since Bryan Murray was fired two years after his January 1999 acquisition of Pavel Bure, who walked out on the Canucks but returned a couple of decades later to have his jersey retired.
Brian Burke was the Vancouver GM at the time, but made the deal reluctantly — partly because he wanted more for Bure, and partly because he was cranky about the Russian Rocket forcing a trade. But Burke made the deal, Bure got his wish — as stated by Murray — to be the focal point of the Panthers, and it turned out Ed Jovanovski was a pretty awesome defenceman for the Canucks.
As soon as Burke dealt with Bure, he fired Mike Keenan as the Canucks’ head coach so the new guy behind the bench, Marc Crawford, would get the benefit of Jovo in his lineup.
Apparently, Keenan bore no grudge because six-and-a-half years later, as the Panthers’ GM, he traded Luongo to the Canucks on June 23, 2006, for a package of players that included Todd Bertuzzi.
Dave Nonis, Burke’s protege and successor, also was trying to help a new coach, Alain Vigneault, by deleting Bertuzzi from the dressing room.
At that time, two years after Bertuzzi’s attack on Steve Moore, there was little interest around the NHL in Bertuzzi. So when Keenan called to ask Nonis if he had anything going on Bertuzzi, the Canuck boss bluffed and hinted a deal was imminent.
Keenan really wanted Bertuzzi, and within a couple of days the Canucks had their dream goalie in Luongo.
The trade remains, inarguably, one of the two or three greatest in franchise history — up there with Alek Stojanov for Markus Naslund, and Trevor Linden for Bertuzzi and Bryan McCabe, who were parlayed in later deals into Luongo and Daniel Sedin.
There have been a dozen trades in last 20 years between the Canucks and Panthers — so many that Luongo wasn’t even the first goalie to leave Florida with a return ticket.
Alex Auld, acquired by Burke from Bill Torrey in 2001, was returned to the Panthers in the Luongo trade five years later.
Despite our aversion to pipelines on the West Coast, the flow of goods (and bads) between South Florida and Vancouver has continued since Canuck GM Pat Quinn surrendered a third-round draft pick to get Panther centre Jesse Belanger on March 20, 1996.
The Canucks lost that trade, but nobody noticed because that was the same day Quinn pilfered Naslund from the Pittsburgh Penguins.
BEST AND WORST OF CANUCKS-PANTHERS
Good trade: June 23, 2006. The Canucks acquired the best goalie in franchise history, Roberto Luongo, for Todd Bertuzzi, Bryan Allen and Alex Auld. Bertuzzi played eight more seasons, but was never close to the dominant player he was in Vancouver, while Luongo won 252 games for the Canucks and was a vital piece during the most successful stretch in team history. Bad trade: June 25, 2010. In a deal that hurt the Canucks for years, GM Gillis surrendered a first-round draft pick and Michael Grabner to get US$25-million defenceman Keith Ballard, who was brought in to replace Willie Mitchell but bombed in Vancouver. Good trade: Feb. 28, 2011. Chris Higgins came to the Canucks for minor-leaguer Evan Oberg and a third-round pick, and saved his NHL career on the West Coast. Higgins played all 25 games in Vancouver’s 2011 run to the Stanley Cup Final, and was a dependable depth player over most of the next five seasons. Bad trade: Oct. 22, 2011. David Booth wasn’t a bad guy, unless you were a hungry bear, but he never came close to earning the US$4.25-million annual salary Panthers’ GM Dale Tallon gladly shed in exchange for Mikael Samuelsson and Marco Sturm. Good trade: March 4, 2014. It’s counter-intuitive to list the departure of Luongo as positive for the Canucks, but the deal was a stunner because his 12-year US$64-million contract was widely viewed as untradeable. Although Shawn Matthias left Vancouver after 98 games, the Canucks still have Jacob Markstrom, who will likely replace Ryan Miller as the starter next season. Bad trade: March 20, 1996. Jesse Belanger played only nine games for the Canucks after he was acquired for future considerations, which became a third-round draft pick the Panthers turned into Oleg Kvasha, who helped Florida acquire Luongo from the Islanders in 2000. Maybe that trade helped Vancouver after all.