Weegar emerging as top-flight defenseman
The sight for MacKenzie Weegar — and all the Florida Panthers — was far too familiar: Aaron Ekblad was crawling around on the ice again — almost exactly a year after he sustained an equally frightening seasonending knee injury — and Weegar worried about what was next for his star teammate, longtime defensive partner and, most importantly, close friend.
The injury happened in the first two minutes of an eventual win against the Anaheim Ducks last month, and Weegar had to go through nearly the entire first period wondering if it was just as bad as it looked.
The first period ended, and Weegar headed through the tunnel and right for the visiting training room at the Honda Center.
“I go in like I’m the coach or GM,” he said with a laugh.
“How long is he going to be out?” he barked at the doctors tending his longtime partner.
They told him the good news: This injury was nowhere near as serious as the one that ended Ekblad’s season last year. He was maybe going to be back in time for the first round of the 2022 Stanley Cup playoffs or the second round, at the latest.
“I think that mentally helped him out,” he said and then took a brief pause. “It mentally helped me out, too.”
It also helped to know the injury wouldn’t be a total death knell for the Panthers’ Stanley Cup hopes, because of what Weegar and Florida did after Ekblad’s injury last year.
In the final six weeks of the regular season last year, Weegar transformed from a mostly anonymous toppairing defenseman — the other guy playing next to a James Norris Memorial Trophy contender — into a bona fide star. He finished eighth in Norris Trophy voting and seventh in voting for the NHL All-Star team. Without Ekblad, the Panthers still won 15 of 21 to end the regular season, while allowing just 2.61 goals per game.
There were people who saw it coming in the 201920 NHL season — his coaches in Florida paired him up with Ekblad, he started to blossom into a darling of the analytic community and general manager Bill Zito quickly locked him up on a threeyear deal when he took over after the season — but players from across the league had no idea.
“I didn’t know a lot about him,” admitted defenseman Robert Hagg, whom the Panthers landed in a trade right before the deadline last month.
“I knew we have some great players,” added defenseman Radko Gudas, who signed with Florida as a free agent in 2020, “but I didn’t think Weegs was as good as he is.”
It’s hard to blame them. This has been Weegar since basically the day he started playing hockey — overlooked, slow to catch on and just waiting for a chance to prove himself.
“My whole life has sort of just been taking advantage of opportunities,” the 28-year-old Canadian said. “It was my turn to step up.”
‘A LATE BLOOMER’
Weegar was at risk of falling through the cracks in Ontario’s crowded hockey world, which, really, wasn’t all too surprising. The defenseman never made the highest-level minor hockey teams he tried out for when he was young and, until he was 16 or 17, never really thought he would play at a high level, anyway.
In 2011, he was eligible for the Ontario Hockey League’s Priority Selection Draft and no one seemed to care. All 22 teams passed over him 15 times. Matthew Ebbs, his agent and uncle, started calling up teams to try to find him a spot as an undrafted free agent, and the Halifax Mooseheads of the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League (QMJHL) took a shot. They brought Weegar into training camp and he bombed the audition. They told him to go back the lower-level Central Canadian Hockey League. Maybe next year he would be ready.
“He just wasn’t physically strong enough and wasn’t in the shape that he needed to be in,” Mooseheads general manager Cam Russell said. Weegar admitted he was sort of chubby.
“He’s been a little bit of a late bloomer,” Russell said.
Weegar joined Halifax the next year and became one of the best players in the QMJHL, leading the league plus-minus in 2013 and garnering All-Star honors in 2014. Still, the NHL mostly wasn’t impressed. In the 2014 NHL Entry Draft, every team passed over him six times before the Panthers finally took him with the sixth-tolast pick.
Weegar spent nearly three full seasons in the minors — including a 21game stint in the lowestlevel ECHL — before he finally got to South Florida at the end of the 2016-17 NHL season. He did not want to leave and, as a bottom-of-the-roster defenseman, he realized the best way to stay was to become a lockdown defender.
“If you’re trusted in the defensive zone, you’ll play more,” Weegar said. “I just knew that, later on, my offensive ability will be there.”
‘RECOGNIZED IN FLORIDA’
During the past two seasons, Weegar has been the second best 5-on-5 defensive player in hockey, according to TopDownHockey’s wins above replacement. Add in Weegar’s penalty-killing contributions and no one has been worth more defensive wins above replacement.
At 6-foot and 210 pounds, Weegar is not a typical burly defensiveminded defenseman, though. His strengths are his speed and his positioning — he ranks third in the NHL with 71 takeaways and 11th with 145 blocked shots — and how good he is once he gets the puck in the defensive zone. In the past three seasons, Weegar has started nearly 50 percent of his shifts in the defensive zone, yet his Corsi percentage — which helps track time spent in the offensive zone — is second behind only star center Aleksander Barkov, among players who have spent all three seasons with the Panthers.
“It’s just those little things,” Weegar said.
They’re easy skills to overlook. In Florida, they aren’t.
In Broward County, he’s something close to a star, with his long hair and “Weather with Weegsy” videos on Twitter making him one of the most recognizable Panthers on the roster.
“I never used to get recognized in Florida,” he said. “I get people coming up to me all the time now.”
It helps to be good, too, and the Panthers’ most loyal supporters have watched the whole story play out in real time.
Weegar was a free agent back in 2020 and Florida — with a new GM and another early exit in the 2020 Stanley Cup playoffs — could have let him walk.
Zito spent the offseason reshaping the roster, bringing in 10 new lineup fixtures and doubling down on building around his core of Ekblad, Barkov and All-Star left wing Jonathan Huberdeau.
Weegar, he decided, would be part of it, too. He was too valuable to let go. The last year has been proof.
“I’m really blessed that he wanted to keep me here,” Weegar said. “This is always where I wanted to be. It’s where I want to continue to be.”
David Wilson: 305-376-3406, @DBWilson2