The Florida Panthers are on the verge of a disastrous season. They're as win-now as it gets, and they're not done yet, writes Mike Stephens.
The Florida Panthers are a desperate team these days. They'll admit it themselves, even.
"I'd say that's accurate," said Panthers forward Carter Verhaeghe to reporters on the morning of Florida's meeting with the Toronto Maple Leafs this past week.
"We're fighting for our playoff lives right now. It's no secret we're desperate."
Any team sitting on the outside of the NHL's playoff picture with fewer than 10 games remaining would consider themselves desperate. You play to win, after all.
But the Panthers are different. Punching a ticket to this dance was thought to be a foregone conclusion for this club – one their front office tried to ensure by mortgaging the majority of their draft and prospect capital this past summer.
Those moves have turned the Panthers into arguably the most win-now team in the entire NHL right now.
This is a club sitting roughly $5 million over the salary cap at the moment after spending the regular season nickel-and-diming their way through paper transactions to merely stay compliant.
The Panthers don't pick in the first round until 2026, with their top pick in 2023 – labeled by most to be the deepest draft in recent memory – being sent to Montreal at last year's trade deadline. It got them a depth defender who was supposed to solidify the lineup's Stanley Cup bid and yet walked in free agency for nothing after 30 total games of service and a second-round sweep.
Florida's prospect pipeline now stands as their primary internal source of reinforcements, given how they raided their own cupboard of picks. It was just ranked 22nd among the NHL's 32 teams in The Hockey News' Future Watch issue and 26th of 32 clubs by The Athletic.
That is less than ideal. But concessions must be made sometimes. And these concessions, those that hamper the Panthers now and will in the future, were made in the name of winning and winning alone. That's why you go all in, after all.
And yet, here the Panthers sit, on the first day of April, one point out of the Eastern Conference's second wild-card spot.
This has the makings of a disaster. But they're not going down without a fight, either. Not yet.
The Panthers ended up winning that matchup versus the Maple Leafs on Wednesday night in dramatic fashion, beating a divisional rival, a contender, on the road, with their third-string goaltender in net.
The stakes were about as high as they come at this stage of the schedule. With their season quite literally on the line, the Panthers somehow managed to live another day by relying on career journeyman Alex Lyon to stand on his head for a 38-save performance in which he allowed just one goal and robbed superstar Auston Matthews point-blank in overtime to keep his team alive.
It shouldn't have gotten to that point, really. The fate of their playoff lives hanging in the balance should have been sufficient motivation for the Panthers to play a game that didn't hinge on the shoulders of a veteran AHLer who entered the night with a .861 save percentage. But they don't ask "how" as long as you leave the rink with two points. And that's precisely what the Panthers did.
It's become something of a trend, though. Getting by by the skin of their teeth. A trend that began back in July when the Panthers took a massive swing during the off-season that, to this point, has not paid off.
Stinging from their sweep at the hands of the Tampa Bay Lightning, GM Bill Zito dropped a nuke on a roster that had just captured the Presidents' Trophy roughly three months prior, famously dealing MacKenzie Weegar and Jonathan Huberdeau to Calgary while also letting Claude Giroux, Mason Marchment, Noel Acciari, Ben Chiarot, Robert Hagg and Markus Nutivaara walk to free agency.
The latter six's replacements have been a mixed bag, to say the least. But perhaps the most impactful move Zito made came behind the bench, letting go of coach Andrew Brunette, who had overtaken the role following Joel Quenneville's early-season resignation before leading the team to the best offensive season in the NHL's Modern Era, and hiring Paul Maurice in his place.
Simply put: The Panthers took what made them special in 2021-22 and gutted it.
Under Brunette, the Panthers would move the puck with vigor in all three zones, cross the opposing blueline with controlled possession and allow their high-octane top weapons to cook with their creativity and instincts. Under Maurice, the Panthers have devolved into a predictable dump-and-chase team – one that can still put up some very promising possession numbers at even strength thanks to their top-heavy talent but has lacked the puck distribution and finishing ability from the year prior.
This lack of results has predictably led to some frustration within, most of which came to a head on Wednesday when Maurice absolutely blew a gasket at Panthers players after they allowed an odd-man rush goal that, funnily enough, would ultimately be called back.
As for what was said during Maurice's tirade?
"You don't want to know," answered captain Aleksander Barkov.
"It wasn't calculated," said Maurice following the game.
"It was just honest. That was where I was at. If I could've yelled louder, if I could've found a way to be more f---ing profane than I was, I would've."
Maurice's combustible methods that night seemed to work, as the Panthers would end up winning the game in dramatic fashion, but it's an interesting glimpse into the temperature around the team these days. That Maurice boiled over just one day after Keith Tkachuk, former NHL forward and father to current Panthers superstar Matthew Tkachuk, blasted the club on Toronto radio for, among other things, being soft is not insignificant.
The expectations are sky-high for the Panthers this season, and they simply haven't met them. Each day brings the threat of a disaster that looms closer and closer. The clock is ticking. And with the remaining runway coming to an end, time is running out to avoid what just mere months ago was unthinkable.
No pressure.