Have the Florida Panthers galaxy brained themselves into oblivion?

How much damage can one playoff series loss do?

Evidently, a ton. It was enough to erase the most memorable and successful season in Florida Panthers history in a matter of four games. In Round 2 of the Stanley Cup playoffs, the Tampa Bay Lightning rolled up like Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones in Men in Black and – flash! – rendered all Florida’s 2021-22 accomplishments meaningless.

At least, that’s what seemed to happen based on GM Bill Zito’s moves in the weeks and months that followed.

His team won the franchise’s first Presidents’ Trophy, racking up a staggering 122 points, the seventh highest total in the NHL’s 104-season history. Their 58 wins tied for the fifth-most all-time. They averaged the most goals per game of any NHL team in the past 26 years. First-liner Jonathan Huberdeau tied for second in league scoring with 115 points and set an NHL single-season record for assists by a left winger with 85. So, yes, naturally, the Panthers felt it was necessary to tear the roster apart after only winning one playoff round. Jack Adams Award finalist Andrew Brunette? Sorry bud, here’s the door. We’re opting for a new coach in Paul Maurice, an extremely well spoken man who happens to have the most losses in NHL history and has made the playoffs in nine of 24 seasons.

Am I oversimplifying the circumstances to prove a point? Of course. And some of the Cats’ summer roster turnover was inevitable. The likes of Claude Giroux and Ben Chiarot were clear trade-deadline rentals with little chance to re-sign and fit under the cap in Florida. Fair. Maybe UFA left winger Mason Marchment priced himself off the team with his incredibly efficient season, in which he finished third among all NHLers in 5-on-5 points per 60 while toiling as a third-liner. And no one could’ve predicted Anthony Duclair sustaining a serious Achilles injury during offseason training.

But the Matthew Tkachuk trade, which required Florida to send Huberdeau and defenseman MacKenzie Weegar to the Calgary Flames, may or may not be remembered down the road as Zito’s Icarus moment.

From the Panthers’ perspective, it made sense on plenty of levels. They locked up a true unicorn in power forward Tkachuk and, following a prudent new trend across the league, are paying top dollar for a player’s prime years. He’s just 24 years old. He’ll be 32 when his eight-year contract wraps up. That’s $9.5 million in annual cap space extremely well allotted. In a vacuum I can understand the logic of wanting to spend wisely on an asset that should remain valuable for the duration of his contract rather than committing to Huberdeau, who is 29 and signed a seven-year extension with the Flames that will pay him until he’s 38.

From a pure spending perspective, I get it. But when you factor in that Florida gave up one of the league’s premier shutdown defensemen in Weegar…from a bird’s eye perspective, I see a franchise that was right there among the league’s elite, the epitome of a win-now operation, choosing to set itself back for the long term.

Trying to build a lineup that will compete over time is logical if your team is rebuilding, in decline or has failed to progress several seasons in a row. But it borders on self sabotage when you’re reversing course on a team that just won the fifth-most games in NHL history. And, speaking to Aaron Ekblad before the season started, I got the sense the Panthers players were pretty flabbergasted by the moves. The tension was palpable – from Ekblad and Zito, if you’ll recall from this story.

Here was Ekblad giving me his thoughts on the trade:

“There is a correct way to answer that question, and that would be, ‘It’s a business and I’m sad to see (them) go but happy with the return. Realistically, yes, I’m very happy with Matthew as a player. I think he’s going to be great for us. But sad doesn’t even cover it when it comes to the two guys that we lost. They’re great friends of mine. I played with them for a really long time. It’s all part of the business, but at the end of the day it was a shock to see them go and to lose them as teammates. I’m going to try and stay as close as I can to those guys. They’re great friends and good people and I’m going to miss them a ton.”

And Zito:

“I think at some point it’s important for the success of the group that the leaders embrace the change as a positive,” Zito told Daily Faceoff. “I don’t think I needed their permission, but I do feel I certainly respect them as human beings first and as leaders and as significant drivers of the culture. So it’s important to them to understand and to embrace change.”

And now, with Ekblad landing on long-term injured reserve, just long enough to hurt the team’s competitiveness but not long enough to allow them to shop for a long-term replacement, the team’s worst nightmare has come true. Tkachuk looks dominant early on this season, a true play driver, and I have little doubt that he’ll deliver on the value of his contract. But now, with Ekblad out and Weegar gone, not to mention Brandon Montour out short term, we’re looking at a top four on defense of…drumroll…Marc Staal, Gustav Forsling, Josh Mahura and Radko Gudas.

Hey, maybe the Panthers survive a couple months of being extremely depleted on defense. They still have Tkachuk, Aleksander Barkov, Sam Reinhart, Sam Bennett, Carter Verhaeghe and Anton Lundell driving the bus at forward. They’re probably still a playoff team.

But I would argue they voluntarily peeled off their Stanley Cup contender label over the summer, dangerously depleting their depth, in the name of crafting a long-term contender. And if the point of building a long-term contender is to, you know, contend, why would you walk away from a position in which you are the primary Cup contender? Why save up for that fine Italian sports car when you had the Maserati sitting in your driveway already?

The opposite course to chart is what GM Brad Treliving has done in Calgary – even after losing first-liners Tkachuk and Johnny Gaudreau. Will the contracts he gave Huberdeau, Weegar and Nazem Kadri look good a few seasons from now when they’re getting deeper into their 30s? Probably not. But the Flames were fresh off a dominant season in which they won the Pacific Division. Treliving realized there was no time like the present to stomp his foot on the gas and push for a Stanley Cup.

At the NHL’s Board of Governors meetings this week in New York, commissioner Gary Bettman indicated the $1.1 billion debt paid from players to owners because of pandemic revenue shortfall could be retired as soon as this season and that the cap had a chance to rise by as much as $4-5 million even by this summer. So maybe the Panthers, who have their core taken care of and have Patric Hornqvist’s cap hit coming off the books, make me look silly and power up with some major additions this summer.

But it won’t change the fact that they took a 122-point team that just won its first playoff series in 26 years…and galaxy brained it into a shakier operation that may or may not be able to survive a long-term Ekblad injury.

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Have the Florida Panthers galaxy brained themselves into oblivion?

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