Florida Panthers Offseason Preview

2024-06-10

The Florida Panthers are known for being a proactive organization. Their GM PKayne isn’t shy of making big moves to help his team stay a contender and they also always like to be active at the draft, trying to pick high even if they are making the playoffs season after season. Building a solid team through the draft and some trades will eventually bring hard decisions to the table though. And that’s what PKayne just made: He took the hard decision to trade Jonathan Huberdeau who’s been with the team since the league has begun almost 13 years ago.

We’ve reached to PKayne to have his comments on this trade:

“Trading some vets is definitely the hardest and most heart-breaking task I have to assume as a GM. Jonathan (Huberdeau) gave us a lot of good seasons, years, memories, both on and off the ice but you know, there’s a salary cap to deal with and you got to make it work. Hubydoo still had 3 years at 10,000,000$ on his contract and even if I’m really confident he’s going to bounce back and earn his contract, we felt like it was the right player to sacrifice. We had to re-sign our franchise player Nathan MacKinnon to a new contract and his agent was hard to deal with. We had little to no leverage since he was an upcoming UFA so we had to pay an hefty price to keep him in the fold. Tim Stützle, Cole Caufield and Trevor Zegras were all coming off their entry-level contracts too so there was a lot to deal with. We knew we weren’t going to fetch a ton in return for Huberdeau considering his AAV but we unfortunately had to move on from him. So we’ll take the 4th round pick. Good luck Joe!”

Then, I asked him about his most recent trade where he sent the rights of Adam Lowry to St. Louis in exchange of a 5th and 7th round pick.

“Kind of minor deal we like to complete for sure. But it’s still a deal where we add 2 draft picks that could be eventually used in another trade or, of course, to add some prospects in the later round. We’re confident our scouts can find us some talented young players there. Lowry was really good for us but he wasn’t going to re-sign with us and St. Louis had a good spot for him in his roster so he’ll probably have a bigger role there. Happy for him, he deserves it!”

When asked if there was still some work to do in the offseason, here’s what PKayne had to say:

“Of course! There’s always a lot to do. We’ve happy the first step of re-signing our players to contracts extension is done. It’s always an exhausting process but it has to be done. Now that Joe (Huberdeau) is gone, we have around 7,000,000$ in cap space and we have to add some forwards to our group. We have plenty of pro dmen so we’ll consider trading one or some for some forwards. We’ll watch the UFA market closely but you often have to overpay to get a good player there so we’ll see. We also have the 19th overall pick in this year’s draft so of course we’re doing some meetings to put together a list. We’re confident we’re going to get a really good prospect there but we’re also open to move the pick for immediate help. We’ll see where it goes!”

So apparently, PKayne isn’t done at all. It’s going to be another exciting offseason in Miami!

Mark Kandy
Miami Sun