The Florida Panthers Fire Their Coaching Staff

Well, you kinda knew this was coming.

I’m sure even those men with their heads on the proverbial chopping block half-expected that their tenure in Sunrise, FL would end in this manner. Two years after winning the Southeast Division title, the Florida Panthers have disintegrated to become the worst team in the League. When your team excels at being awful – they came out of the gate lame, 3-9-4, and now working on an epically bad seven-game losing streak – it doesn’t take a blind man to see that change is necessary.

Quite often, a head coach is fired and their bright young assistant (sometimes a coach who’s come through the team’s minor ranks, by way of the American Hockey League and/or the East Coast Hockey League) quietly takes over for the rest of the season…and is often given the permanent job thereafter. It’s a good tester to see if a potential head coach has what it takes to do the job and compete in the toughest hockey competition in the world.

Obviously, that course of action wasn’t enough for the powers-that-be at the Panthers, who’ve swung the axe in a major way, relieving head coach Kevin Dineen of his duties, and also terminating assistants Gord Murphy and Craig Ramsay. GM Dale Tallon promised that there would be more changes forthcoming. Veteran defenseman Ryan Whitney, a healthy scratch for most of this season, has already been placed on waivers. You get the feeling there’ll be more moves made as the Panthers navigate the month of November.

And it’s not hard to see why. Fresh off being the worst team in the lockout-shortened season, this seven-game losing streak was the proverbial straw to break the camel’s back, and, for mine, a long time coming. The Panthers, despite having some pretty good young talent on their team – 2012-13 NHL Rookie of the Year Jonathan Huberdeau chief amongst them – are mired at the bottom of the League and had shown no signs under the just-fired coaching staff of lifting themselves any higher.

The worst thing about having great talent and a bad coaching staff is that brilliant players are underdeveloped and they tend to not reach their full potential – i.e. the potential the Panthers front office doubtless saw when scouting the likes of Huberdeau, 2013 first round pick Aleksander Barkov and young defenseman Dmitry Kulikov (in his fifth season, but still only twenty-three years old). 

Clearly, Tallon decided that enough was enough. He hadn’t seen the requisite improvement of these young kids, and so pulled the trigger. The clean-out is on in Sunrise, and coming into the organisation – an unenviable position at the moment – is AHL veteran coach Peter Horachek, who, of course, has been slapped with the ‘interim’ tag, for which he may be glad. Florida has given up the second-most goals this year (after giving up the most last year) because they only have two defensemen with a plus rating. I don’t care which way you look at it, that’s flat-out bad.

The situation in net is even worse. Their goalie hope, 39-year-old Tim Thomas, is nursing his second injury of the young season, which isn’t that hard to diagnose: I mean, the man is at the back end of his professional hockey life, and he came into the team having sat out a year, which is a killer at that age. With Thomas out, young goalie Jacob Markstrom is a guy in a shooting gallery, getting absolutely nothing from his defence. No wonder the twenty-three-year-old is getting lit up like a pinball machine. It must be murder on his self-confidence.

It will be interesting to see what the new coaches can do with Markstrom and the goalie situation. Get some good, solid defensive players, would be a good start. Manage the youngsters better, a close second. They’ve relied too much on the kids this season, and it’s tough to put such responsibility on guys who’re barely old enough to shave, and who aren’t established pros yet. It’s almost unfair. 

Huberdeau, who was a gold-plated prospect coming out of juniors, and who shone on the world stage at the IIHF Juniors, and others, like Nick Bjugstad, the towering former Minnesota Golden Gopher, who’s as talented a player as there was in last year’s draft, would have been sent to the AHL for a conditioning stint, and to get used to pro hockey and it’s nuances, which are markedly different from either Canadian Major Junior or NCAA competition in America. Players need time to adjust, to find their feet, and to progress. It’s a career-staller to stick them right into the NHL, unless they’re a guy with the can’t-miss talent of, say, Ryan Nugent-Hopkins or Sidney Crosby.

Horachek needs an injection of veteran talent as soon as possible. He needs to make moves at or before the trade deadline. The Panthers barely have a player on their roster whom you might call elite – veteran defenseman Brian Campbell is probably about the only one to whom I’d assign that tag – and instead are relying on journeymen and guys who’ve had one good season, are paid stupid money by another club as a result…and can never live up to that one big year. I’ve never understood that process.

Changes are obviously afoot, but is it all too late? The problem with being a non-traditional hocket market, as Florida obviously is, is that you need wins and championships to survive. Get those bandwagon fans going with some wins and good players, and you put butts on seats, which has been a problem down in Florida for a long time. A seven-game losing streak, no offense and no defense isn’t the way to win the hearts and the minds of the fans. 

Horachek has a lot of work to do, and not much time in which to do it.