Why were Panthers the only team not to make trade ahead of deadline? GM Bill Zito explains
It was one of the wildest trade deadlines in NHL history and just about every team made a deal. There was only one exception: the Florida Panthers.
As the deadline passed Friday, the Panthers sat still. They were the only team in the league not to make a trade, dating back to the start of the new year. It’s a result largely of the strange position in which they find themselves.
With less than 20 games to go and less than a year removed from winning its first Presidents’ Trophy, Florida is barely sitting on the fringe of postseason contention, four points out of the second wild card after losing 5 of 9. The Panthers should be right in their window of contention, so they couldn’t sell; they’re unlikely to make the 2023 Stanley Cup playoffs, so they couldn’t buy.
“We’re in a tenuous situation,” general manager Bill Zito admitted. “There’s no question.”
Florida (30-27-6) fielded offers throughout the last few days and explored different possibilities in recent weeks, and yet ultimately settled on an entirely uneventful trade deadline.
NHL trade deadline tracker: Will the underachieving Panthers buy or sell (or neither)?
Defenseman Radko Gudas, in the final year of his contract, is staying put, and so are centers Sam Bennett and Sam Reinhart. Forward Eric Staal and defenseman Marc Staal, also both on one-year deals and in their late 30s, won’t go chase a Stanley Cup elsewhere and the Panthers didn’t try to load up in the same way so many of the Eastern Conference’s best teams have.
The 2022-23 NHL season, even if Zito didn’t admit it, is close to a lost cause. Florida’s best course of action is to start thinking about 2024 and beyond, especially with essentially every player of note locked up beyond this year.
“There’s tremendous value in security and knowing, OK, we have our core together. What do we need to move forward to be better?” Zito said.
On deadline day, the Panthers decided nothing they could do would suffice.
Gudas, 32, was at the center of most of Florida’s trade conversations and yet even he wouldn’t have fetched the Panthers much more than a mid-round pick in a future NHL Entry Draft. Florida, Zito said, “would like to keep” the Czech veteran beyond this season and has already started conversations with him about a new contract. An easier path to keeping Gudas — plus the value he’ll still provide in the final 19 games of the regular season — would outweigh anything the Panthers could have gotten for him in a trade, the organization decided.
Gudas, after all, was the first player Zito signed when he got to South Florida in 2020, and his locker-room presence and physical style were a big part of why the Panthers were one of the best teams in the league the last two years.
“We’ve spent a lot of time and a lot of effort trying to get our culture moving forward in the right direction, and the one thing that we were mindful of is we didn’t want to quit on the group,” Zito said. “If there was a deal to be made to help our team really short-term, long-term — we’d do it, but we evaluate each one and today we’re OK holding them.”
There was also the matter of Florida’s nearly empty war chest.
This deadline was a far cry from the last one, when the Panthers went on a spending spree, sending away first-round picks in two separate trades to get forward Claude Giroux and defenseman Ben Chiarot. In the offseason, they then sent away another first-round pick in their trade for All-Star right wing Matthew Tkachuk.
Altogether, its aggressive moves in recent years left Florida without any first-round picks until 2026 or top-40 prospects, according to TheHockeyWriters.com. Any moves the Panthers made this week would have been about helping next year as much as this season, and they didn’t have much of a capability to do this, either.
“It’s like shopping in Bal Harbour with empty pockets,” Zito said.
It is, of course, his own doing — Giroux and Chiarot are gone, with only a trip to the second round of the 2022 Stanley Cup playoffs to show for it — and now he’s staring at a make-or-break offseason.
For two years, Zito could almost do no wrong. The Panthers went from irrelevant to elite almost overnight when they hired him and last year won their first postseason series since 1996.
This precipitous drop, from the best record in the NHL to likely missing the Stanley Cup playoffs, is alarming, though. Unless it puts together an unlikely run in the next few months, Florida will be under heavy pressure to return to contention next year and will have more than $11 million in cap space this offseason to make it happen, after facing a cap crunch with more than $6 million in dead cap this year.
Nothing the Panthers could do now was going to seriously change their fortunes for this year or the future. Their problems have been months in the making and solving them will now have to wait until the end of the season, unless they start an incredible turnaround Saturday when they host the Pittsburgh Penguins (31-21-9) at 6 p.m. at FLA Live Arena in Sunrise.
“You always want to get players and pieces, and put it together and help your team. And then sometimes when you’re handcuffed, that can be a little frustrating,” Zito said. “We didn’t want to make moves just to make moves.”
