Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
All alone at the top
Luongo’s legacy with the Panthers was always No. 1
Where does a night like this start? With
Roberto Luongo as a kid, wearing foam pads made from seat cushions in his family’s basement in the Little Italy section of Montreal?
Or maybe it starts later, near the start of his
NHL career, when he expected to hear he was the New York Islanders’ starting goalie and was told instead he was traded to the Florida Panthers.
“I got here, palm trees everywhere,” he said. “Part of me was like, ‘Hey, I can’t believe they have a hockey team here.’”
Maybe Saturday night’s ceremony to retire Luongo’s Panthers jersey really started in the winter of 2014. A phone call interrupted his pre-game nap before his Vancouver team played Arizona. He had been traded back to the Panthers.
“I was pleasantly surprised — I thought those talks had died,” he said.
Suddenly, if briefly, the Panthers had life again. Remember? He helped bring that. The Panthers made the playoffs the following year. They lost to the Islanders in the opening round. Still, the future looked like a rising sun for the franchise.
“That was huge because it validated me coming back here,” Luongo, 40, said. “I wanted to come back and you could see the
potential and the vision we had for the team coming back. At that point, it was very gratifying. It made it worthwhile to have gone through the whole process.”
He was a strong, if quiet, leader. Winger Jonathan Huberdeau, who also was from Montreal and spoke French, remembers Luongo sitting with him on the team plane. Helping him. Huberdeau points to Luongo’s self-effacing Twitter account to explain the goalie’s presence inside the team.
Luongo’s most recent tweet came after 42-year-old Zamboni driver David Ayres was pressed into service as Carolina’s emergency goalie to beat Toronto.
“Ayres has more wins in Toronto than I do smh,” he tweeted, congratulating Ayres even if, for the record, Luongo had a solid 26-15-1 record against Toronto.
That playoff season in 2015-16, of course, is as good as it got in Luongo’s Panthers years. That’s the odd part of his certain Hall of Fame career. His great success was elsewhere. He won the Olympic gold in 2010 with Team Canada. He went to the Stanley Cup Finals with Vancouver, where he finished second for the Hart Trophy as the NHL’s most valuable player and was a three-time finalist for the Vezina Trophy as the league’s top goalie.
With the Panthers, he gave hope every night in goal but was let down by the larger franchise. That playoff berth never repeated itself. Management and coaching changes sank the next season. They then missed the postseason by a point in 2017-18.
That’s part of his story — of greatness unrewarded, like quarterback Archie Manning with the New Orleans Saints or Ernie Banks with the Chicago Cubs. Even now, as Luongo meets to talk of Saturday’s ceremony, the Panthers have lost five of six games and another season is on life support.
“I wish this was under better circumstances,’’ he says at one point.
He’s on the other side in retirement. He’s in the Panthers front office, learning how it works from the salary cap to player trades. This had been his hope for years, fueled in part by a love of fantasy football and baseball.
“I love that stuff,” he said. “Drafting. Trades. It’s like a big puzzle to put together.”
It’s fitting Luongo stayed part of the Panthers after his career for another reason. Somewhere through the years, through these moves, as the prospect became a star, this became home for Luongo. He met his wife here. They raised their children in Parkland. He took the microphone in the Panthers first game after the shootings at Stoneman Douglas High and spoke emotionally for all of us.
“I just want to start off by saying that I live in Parkland,” Luongo said in starting that night. “I’ve been living there for the past 12 years. My wife was born and raised in that area. My kids go to school in Parkland. When I’m done playing hockey, I want to spend the rest of my life in Parkland. I love that city.”
He talked without notes, right form the heart. Just as he plans Saturday night. He says public speaking was never a strong point for him through high school. He grew nervous. He stuttered. But accompanying his rise as a player became him becoming more comfortable in public.
His only worry Saturday night is forgetting a name to thank. Family is coming. Friends. Teammates. When he played his final game last spring, he still was planning to come back for another year and so no one beyond his wife and children attended.
Something changed in him during the offseason. He knew it was time to get his body ready and didn’t feel motivated. The process of a long career had run its course. He played 19 years. He took the jersey No. 1 as a kid because, even then, “I wanted to be No. 1 — No. 1 goalie, No. 1 everything.”
On Saturday, it all comes full circle. The Panthers play Montreal. And the kid who wore car cushions for pads in his Montreal basement watches that No. 1 jersey rise to the rafters.