Florida Panthers Roundtable
Three takeaways: Ekblad seems okay, Panthers make 'unusually foolish' mistakes in loss to Canucks
Vancouver added Roberto Luongo to the Canucks Ring of Honour, but is that a fitting way to recognize the Hall of Famer?
The Florida Panthers will be looking to move on from a couple tough nights in Seattle and Vancouver, failing to score a goal in a pair of 4-0 defeats.
One of the two losses was a bit more acceptable than the other, based off how Florida performed and how disciplined they played, but ultimately the end result remained the same.
Still, there was a reasonable expectation that the Panthers would show up better on Thursday in Vancouver considering they were fresh off a shutout loss to a team that had been on an eight-game losing streak.
That wasn’t the case, as Florida looked less and less like the consistent squad it had been for much of this season during a second straight embarrassing loss in the pacific northwest.
Aaron Ekblad is fine
There was obvious concern when Panthers defenseman Aaron Ekblad did not come out with the rest of his teammates for the third period of Thursday’s loss in Vancouver.
There was no apparent play during the game where Ekblad appeared to be injured, but he suffered or tweaked a lower-body injury at some point and the decision was made to hold him out of the final frame.
It helped that Florida had dressed 11 forwards and seven defensemen, making the transition a bit smoother for the Panthers blueliners who remained in the game.
After the game, Florida Head Coach Paul Maurice seemed to downplay the injury being anything serious or lingering.
“I don’t even know if it’s day-to-day,” Maurice said. “We’ll see how he is tomorrow. We think we got way ahead of it.”
An unusual loss
While the Panthers have now lost consecutive games by the same 4-0 score, the two contests were actually quite different.
In Seattle, the Panthers and Kraken battled in a tight game for much of the night, with Florida controlling much of the play but unable to capitalize on any opportunities.
Against Vancouver, the Panthers did not seem to get in sync until the game was already out of hand, making uncharacteristic errors and just appearing to be lacking an edge and sense of urgency they usually display.
For a team that has become as defensively and tactically sound as the Panthers have, it was an odd occurrence, to say the least.
“We did some unusually foolish things that we just don't do,” Maurice said. “We just weren't right tonight. I think you have those games. I don't think it's related to the Seattle game. Prior to that, we had won three in a row. We weren't very good here tonight, but in a highly unusual way. I'll take solace in the fact, that when we look at it, that we don't do a lot of the things that we did tonight.”
Luongo honored, but snubbed?
Before Thursday’s game, Vancouver honored former goaltender Roberto Luongo, adding him to the Canucks Ring of Honour.
It’s hard to argue that Luongo was the best goaltender in Canucks franchise history and his list of accomplishments and accolades while playing for Vancouver will more than back that up.
That’s why it was a no-brainer that he was added to the Ring of Honour, but it’s also a head-scratcher. Why wouldn’t the Canucks retire Luongo’s No. 1?
An interesting piece by Thomas Drance of The Athletic tackles the topic in great detail.
I also discuss with Roy Bellamy of the Dan LeBatard Show with Stugotz on our weekly hockey show, which can be seen below.
[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vg88CfD1DgA[/embed]
“it's great because he's around us, like he's part of our team now, and he's around every day,” Maurice said of Luongo. “And then it's good for some of our new guys too, that maybe there's a few young guys that wouldn’t have played against him and get to see how important he was to this community and to this team (in Vancouver) as he was for the Florida Panthers as well. It's nice to be a part of it.”
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