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Sportsnet: Elliotte Friedman and Jeff Marek on 32 Thoughts: The Podcast – Fined for Flying on the Florida Panthers
** NHLRumors.com transcription
Marek: “Scale of one to the sky is falling, how concerned are you about the Florida Panthers, and the caveat being, the Florida Panthers don’t own their first-round pick. It’s owned by the Montreal Canadiens. Oh boy.
Friedman: “So Florida, I think when they did this, this year, that trade with (Matthew) Tkachuk, I think there was a little bit of, we’re going to have a tight year with cap but we’re going to take that risk that we’re still going to be good enough and we’re going to be able to get out of some cap situations after this season.
If you look at their cap situation, they don’t have any major deals coming up. Knights extension kicks in but they don’t have any major deals coming up and they’re going to have a little more flexibility than they do now.
That said, they have no capital to make trades, and I did look at their defense and say, if they weren’t going to get goaltending, they were going to have trouble. And unfortunately, that’s kind of what happened. (Sergei) Bobrovsky’s struggled and (Spencer) Knight, who I still think will be great, has been up and down.
But boy you are right Jeff, that non-protection of the pick, it looms large. As we tape this podcast, they have a five-and-a-half percent chance (6 percent now) at the number one pick. That’s going to be looming large over, I remember when Calgary went through that. They finished I think 13th or 12th from the bottom the year they traded a first-rounder for Travis Hamonic. And I just remember the sweat that they went through, through that draft lottery. Just cause the odds were not that it was going to happen but we’ve seen some weird stuff happen in these NHL draft lotteries. Combinations you’ve never thought of.
And yes, I can only imagine how much they’re thinking about that because I did think Florida was going to take a step back just because of their defense, but I don’t know if any of us thought it would be like this.