Can they really do it?
Now Panthers dare to dream
Panthers are an outside bet to win it all this season.
SUNRISE
— They came on the ice Wednesday for the annual team picture, Jaromir Jagr laughing, Vincent Trocheck with his ankle in a new cast, Willie Mitchell in uniform for the first time in months.
Aaron Ekblad slipped moving to his assigned place and fell on the ice, making everyone laugh. The front office members arrived in gray suits and red ties and sat in their seats.
And so here they allwere, all the 2015-2016 Panthers, who have grown over this regular season into as good a story as hockey has. Owner Vinny Viola then stood up fromhis seat in the front row, middle, and turned to his teamwith a question several repeated later:
“What are the Vegas odds of us winning the Stanley Cup?”
It wasn’t said with a heavy tone, or demanded expectations, and the players threw out uncertain answers that told of the chance ahead.
“Thirty-to-one!” a player said.
“Lower!” another responded.
Nick Bjugstad smiled afterward and said he couldn’t even suggest a number, having no idea of the odds, and General Manager Dale Tallon stayed quiet, too, just taking in the conversation.
But there itwas on the table, the question most teams will ask in some form in the coming playoffs, the one the Panthers haven’t realistically had reason to ask in two decades.
Think of that. Two decades
with five ownership groups and that question can finally be asked with some merit. Those Panthers of 1996 were a surprise of castoff veterans and too-young kids coming together to give a gift this franchise has desperately milked ever since.
These Panthers are a testament to Tallon’s eye for talent, Viola’s deliverance of stability and a good mesh of youth and experience that demands some attention by now.
Where can this season go? Where can’t it? The Heat have a brick wall waiting for them at some point in the NBA playoffs, the most predictable of pro sports. Hockey is the least predictable. Goalies get hot. Bottom seeds regularly topple top seeds. But it’s not time for all that just yet.
“We’ve got to take care of business,” Bjugstad said. “We’re not there [in the playoffs] yet.”
Starting Thursday night against New Jersey, the Panthers play the final six games against non-playoff teams. So the schedule sets up for them to finish with a good chance for first in the division, if they play theway they have most of this season.
They’ll have to do it without their best player of the past severalweeks, too. Trocheck took a puck to his foot in Tuesday’s loss to Toronto, and— at least until the playoffs— the Panthers will be without a scorer, a playmaker, a penalty killer, and the kind of versatile player that defines this team.
“Every team has to overcome something this time of year,” Tallon said.
“A bunch of people will have to step in and help out,” winger Reilly Smith said.
In twoweeks, it will be playoff hockey, and this won’t be a one-year trial theway it’s been on occasion these past two Panthers decades. It should be the start of an annual adventure. Their developing youth suggests that.
Viola, who lives in New York, isn’t around his team much and speaks collectively to them even less. But there Wednesday for the team picture, he spoke afterward about what he wanted to convey in his few-minutes talk.
“I told them to have fun, that we’re coming together as a team, a team of character,” he said .“We’ve got something special going. It’s going to get better and better. I told ’em, ‘Hey, enjoy the playoffs.’”
For the record, the odds of the Panthers winning the Stanley Cup are16-to-1, according toVegasinsider.com. That ranks 10th among NHL teams. So they’re nobody’s favorite.
But frame this team’s photo and say this: They’ve made the distant dream of a Stanley Cup a legitimate question for the first time in two decades.