Florida Panthers Lose To Toronto Maple Leafs 4-1 Welcome To Last Place

Florida Panthers Lose To Toronto Maple Leafs 4-1 Welcome To Last Place

So, uh, apparently, uh, Bhagy Swaggy, the Swiggy Swagger, uh, he, uh, he not going to play, uh, tonight cuz, um, his wife having baby, let me tell you. Uh, so here the thing, uh, car uh, having kids, it change your life, huh? So, um, yeah, good luck. I got no words of advice for you. Uh but maybe now uh you won’t be getting so much at home and you play better in the regular season and so uh congratulations. Um I think yeah you big dummy. You make baby. Let’s go Panthers. Let’s go Panthers. Let’s go Panthers. Let’s go. Let’s go Panthers. Let’s go Panthers. Let’s go Panthers. Let’s go. All right Panther fans, here we go. So, just like everybody predicted last year at the end of the second round when it went seven games and the Panthers won the series and went on to win their second straight cup, one cup, two cups, just like everybody predicted, by the time the Panthers and Leafs would face each other again, it would be the battle for last place, not just in the Atlantic Division, but in the entire Eastern Conference. We all knew this was going to happen. We just thought it would be about six or seven years from now. So, here we are. Now, in terms of the Panthers, the lineup, I’m Bubba, we’re going to need a miracle. All right. Here, fix your hair. There you go. Come on. Let’s Let’s get your hair. You’re going to have to look good tonight. All right. Because um now I don’t know if he’s injured or sick or whatnot. Just going to assume. Um but Verhagi’s out. So, so the lineup, let me see if I can even remember this. Landel Marshan Reinhardt. Good, beautiful, outstanding top line. Fine with it. Bennett with Samuskevich in Greer. I actually like that line. I think that line has the the the um potential to be nasty, nasty, nasty tonight. And we are going to need that because the third line if you’d like to call it that is E-rod who absolutely belongs then with Bquist and Gregor that’s that no that’s not four. No that’s the third line because the fourth line is Studika with Divine and Cunning. Um, so we’re gonna need some points from the blue line and we’re gonna need Bubba to be Vznab and um, nothing bad can happen tonight because there’s just every other team in the Atlantic playing for the most part. So, we could end up we’re going to get our two points. All right. And what I’ve been talking about this on the noon stream. Um, I’m I’m in the camp with Brad Marshian about not counting out anybody with the playoffs and all of that, but I I’m ignoring the wild card for right now. I want third place in the division because with the wild card situation, we’re literally chasing every team in the conference, but if we’re chasing for third place, it’s just a couple of teams. And I think the Panthers can do that. So, that that’s going to be my focus. I I can’t look at every game here because at this point if we’re chasing the wild card, every time somebody in the Eastern Conference gets two points is bad news for us. That’s too much too soon. So now the the news for the Leafs, the Stallars injury is not so good. We don’t know what’s going on there. Now I don’t know the intricacies of that. I don’t know if it’s upper body, lower body. I haven’t seen a lot of information, but I guess Buru said there’s been he’s not been skating and it’s been no improvement. Do we know that this isn’t concussion related? And I hope it’s not. But if a guy’s not improving at all, it just kind of makes you wonder if it’s concussion related and not like an arm or a shoulder or something like that. But you guys can let me know if if there’s been any kind of details at all released that way. All that said, it’s the it’s it’s like somebody said uh in the noon stream today, it’s the Titanic battle tonight. It’s the battle for the bottom of the Atlantic. It’s true. So, Panthers, I would prefer to not have to take any grief from Leaf fans in the chat tomorrow. Um, because they put us in last place. We just had three days off. We should be rested. We should be motivated. Marian has already irritated the Leafs before the game started. This should be two points. You bastards. If you blow another two nothing lead, I will I won’t I won’t do any of the nasty things that I would normally say. Don’t blow any more leads. Please. [Music] So at the end of the period here, Oel trips Samuskevich and he goes hard into the boards. Took him a while to get up and they showed him on the bench and he don’t look so good. He don’t look so good. Rahee’s out cuz his wife is having a baby. So they say having a kid changes your life. So maybe he’ll go back to being regular season card of Rhy. with the team on the ice. I don’t want to make excuses. Like there’s missing guys and not playing at a Stanley Cup championship level. I think all of us can completely understand that. And then there’s what Jeff Petri did in front of the net to allow the second goal. just he just got turned around and w I mean what and I know people want to blame Bob. I mean the first goal is a long shot from way out like it was the dude was outside the stadium. I think the shot actually came from wherever the hell. I mean it’s just unbelievable. Bob, there’s no way he saw it because he didn’t move. Like there’s no way he saw the shot. And then and then of course Petri gets walked dog walked twice in front of the net and the puck is passed by because he has no chance and it’s two nothing. Now we’ve had a couple of chances. Bolinskus had a wide open net and somehow Wool got to it and um the best line we had gone was Bennett Samuskevich and Greer and I’m hopeful that Samuel comes back but it didn’t look it didn’t look so I mean he was in pain on the bench. Don’t be don’t be surprised if I come back here next intermission and he’s not I don’t I it’s it’s unrecognizable like at this point when when you get down to without Verhagi um who was starting to heat up that said the effort is just not there. It’s awful. It’s just Oh, move on to second period. [Music] All right. So, oh boy, it’s two to one after two. It was It was It was It was better. We’ll take it. Um Toronto’s had two power plays, three power plays. E Ecklad commits brutally ridiculous obvious interference and I’m like, “Oh, great. Here we go.” And then they didn’t call it and Kyle and I are busy discussing like, “How do you not call that against Eblad?” But then when he loses his stick and he goes up to the puck carrier and basically gives the guy a hug and so then they call him for holding of course but it should have been a penalty on the interference anyway and then Sam Reinhardt gives us a short-handed goal to put the game within reach at two to one. Um this is the team like we we we want them to win. We get frustrated, we get aggravated, we we get all of the emotions, but the reality is the product on the ice is what the team is right now, which is not a playoff team. Now they can stay within striking distance, but Kachchuck is going to have to along with Lucinan and Nosik and Kulakov. But Kachchuck is going to have to will this team into the playoffs kind of like he did in 2223. Now he should be pretty fresh. So there’s that cuz he’s had all this extra rest. I know he’s rehabbing, but he still had some rest. So, but the the the roster, this roster is not a playoff roster the way it is right now. The guys that are on the ice, it’s not a bad team. Um, but it’s just not. And the other thing is I’m becoming more convinced. At the beginning of the season, we said, “Let’s give Petri a chance. Maybe he’ll take the Nate Schmidt arc.” That’s not happening. Um, I don’t know how we would do it because of our cab situation, but if there’s any way at the trade deadline we could upgrade over Petri so we could have Kulakov with somebody else, I don’t really know if I want it to be Bolinskus, you know what I mean? But Petri on a nightly basis against up upper echelon teams uh in the playoffs, that could be a problem. He’s not. Schmidt started off a little slow and got better as the season went on. That’s not what’s happening with Petri. He’s really exposed now without Kulakov. That’s an area of concern that I’d like for us to try to fix. I don’t know how we would fix it because of our cap issues, but maybe I’ll take a look at that. Meanwhile, as for this game, it’s 2 to one, but you do get the feeling that at any second it could not be two to one in a good way. I generally speaking don’t do this. I generally don’t do this. But we need to change the juju. Bob, I’m talking to you in the middle of the game. I I don’t care. Close the door. Close the door, Bubba. Please. Last place in the conference to the Leafs. Do you not understand? He understands. I’ll see you in 20 minutes. [Music] says, “Is our fake lottery?” Oh, so [Laughter] We’re in last place in the conference. We’re in last place in the conference. A week and a half ago, we were one game away from being in second place. We’re now last place in the conference, and we deserve to be in last place in the conference. Now, we don’t I mean, some people might disagree with me saying we don’t deserve all the injuries. Maybe we do. Like, we didn’t pay any cup tax at all last year. There was basically no cup tax paid. Even the old decrepit defenseman that we picked up in Nate Schmidt rekindled his career and and played well. Um, I I don’t know. Certainly as a Panther fan, I’ve never seen an injury be or a season be so derailed by just injuries and circumstances. I mean, remember this all goes back to, you know, developing a plan where when we got Marian and Zto had a had a plan to keep everybody and we got everything right and tight and then the league was like, “Oh yeah, by the way, we’re going to change the rules with two two weeks before the season for the LTIR.” And then we were like, “Oh my god, what are we going to do when Kachchuck comes back cuz we’re over the cap?” Then Barkov said, “Why don’t I just blow up my knee so that won’t be a problem?” And now, I mean, we’re in last place in the conference. There’s no way to sugarcoat that. Now, you could look at the standings and I don’t know what are we, five, six points out of third place. It’s not undoable, but these are the games that is a home stand, but it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. This is the team. This is the team. Um Reinhardt is giving us probably about as much energy as he has right now. And remember second half of last season and for a lot of the playoffs, we were kind of like, hey, is Reinhardt gassed? Because he kind of looked gassed. Um he’s doing what he can. Bennett is flashing every once in a while, but even at his best, he’s a 45 point regular season guy. Greer is a fourthliner trying to do what he can. Samuskevich needs Bennett and Kachchuck to kind of keep him protected and to be able to develop properly. I mean, you’re putting a lot on that kid. It’s only his second season. We don’t have a number one center. You got Rodriguez out there. It was what 70%. At one point, Toronto had won 35 draws to the Panthers 11. We we every all year, all year, any board battle, we’re losing it. We we’re we get puck and we get a shot. It’s one and done. We’re one and done in the offensive zone. the we’re we’re get hemmed in the defensive zone. The third goal, the one that put the game away here for Toronto. Can’t clear the puck. Can’t clear the puck. Can’t clear the puck. And all of these teams are playing the exact same game against us. And it’s working. They don’t have to play like that every night, but every time we get the puck on our stick, there’s no time and space. They are just on us. and we don’t have the personnel or the energy or the desire or the willingness or the tenacity or the skill or the chemistry. We don’t have any any of the things that it would take to be successful against a team that is playing with that much energy. And the teams know it, which is why as the games go on, for the most part, it looks worse and worse. Now, that’s what we got right now. You want to look across, you want to look along the ice, um I mean the fourth line, it’s Sta with Divine and Cunnan. Like Cunnan is barely. Let’s not forget Cunnan was available off the street when we found out Nosik was hurt at the very end of summer. Conan is at best a replacement level player for a non-competitive team. Divine is a rookie. Studika is not a rookie, but he’s as he’s an okay fourth line guy. He doesn’t have. So, the fourth line is basically useless out there tonight. No offense to those guys. There’s solid hockey players that can give you a game here or there when are surrounded by better players, but that’s not a fourth line on anything remotely close to a playoff team. You got Rodriguez with Boquist and Greor. Again, Greor is just a guy, no offense, but it’s not you can’t look at that bottom six and expect to win games for the most part. You can’t you can’t look at that and be like, well, may I mean, no, we got the result you would expect. Lindell, Marian, Reinhardt, best line on the ice tonight. Got the only goal. Well, Reinhardt’s was shorty. We didn’t get a five on five goal. And then you got Bennett with Samuskevich and and Greer, which was active, but nobody can put the puck in the back of the net. And it doesn’t matter cuz when those guys are coming into the zone, the zone entries are awful. They’re awful. There’s no chemistry. We’re not dumping the puck in and going and fighting for it in the corners because we’re losing every puck battle. So, we’re trying to carry it in with dipsy doodle passes and cross basses. We’re just coming in and just taking the shot. And there’s a rebound. And there’s no fight for the puck. It gets cleared by the defense every single time and they’re going back out of the zone. Forsling got beat two, three times tonight. The the third goal, Ecklad was there, but it wasn’t necessarily his fault. He had positioning and then the puck goes off of his skate. It looks like it’s going to go past him. It goes off the back of his skate and back the other direction. And what? Two more guys against Calgary. Two guys got their first goal of the year. And again here tonight, the Leafs, two of the three goals. The fourth was an empty netter. They were the first goal of the year for those players. It is it is a master class of everything that could possibly go wrong to the point where Vhagi has been starting to heat up and his wife is having a baby. Congratulations. So, I mean, do I think we win this game with Verhagy? Ah, probably not. But it’s just indicative of what we’ve been up against all year. And we just don’t have you. You could list whatever words you want to use. The tenacity, the talent, the desire, the will, the strength, the energy. Pick a word. We don’t we don’t we don’t have it right now. Now, Bubba, Bubba, I give you Pats. Bubba, I give you Bubba did what he could in the third period. He made about three, four, five saves there. The game could have easily been blown out six to one before we ever thought about getting that second goal. So, um I’m not putting this one on Babski. And you know, defensively, Jones is playing as well as we could expect him to play. Jones is definitely trying to make things happen. So, if he gets a little bit out of position or something, I’m not going to blame him because somebody’s got to try to put the puck in the back of the net. Mika had the one game where he was looking like he was going to try to bring some offense. He was invisible tonight. Like I said, Forcing got beat a couple of times. Eggplad was his normal self tonight. The bottom pair, we missed Dimmitri Kulakov like brutally. We miss Kulakov. Kulakov Petri is probably good enough. Although you’d really like to upgrade over Petri. I don’t know if we’re going to be able to have the money to do it. Um, I don’t see you’d have to trade a guy. We already talked about this on the noon stream. People bring trade ideas. It’s like, understand that when we are healthy, we’re $4.5 million over the cap. There’s nobody we’re bringing in with the idea that Barkoff is going to come back in the regular season or in the playoffs, excuse me. There’s nobody we’re bringing in without sending money back out the other way. at some point because we don’t we’re over the cap when we’re healthy. But the Petri situation, I mean, it might be a situation where we have to deal with it, but I’d love to be able to upgrade there if we were actually going to be in the playoffs and be attempting to finish up a three pete. I understand that right now it doesn’t look anything like a team that could three Pete, but this is not the Panthers. It’s just it’s just not our team out there on the ice. And you know, we’re as fans, we’re all going to go through that. We’re get mad, aggravated, frustrated, all the different emotions. But the reality of the situation is is the reality of the situation. And so, yeah, we wake up right now. We’re last place in the conference. Don’t know how many points we are out. I know everybody’s going to want to make trades and is Babsky 20 and all of that. And I will still stand here and tell you that healthy healthy this team should still win the conference. Healthy. But the problem is we’re not. And there goes that battery again. I have a battery on order. So, I had 40 minutes at the start of this. So, I’m going to pause it again, charge up for another couple of minutes, and then we’ll finish up. I got a battery on order. It should be here today or tomorrow. Just just like the rest of the season. Everything’s malfunctioning. All right. So, we’ll try to finish this up. I hope it’s the battery, not the camera, cuz it even says 44 minutes left right now. And I know I probably won’t even be here for five. Here’s bottom line. One cup, two cups. We’ve been to three straight finals. As Panther fans, we can’t complain. Life is, any of you who have lived more than 5 minutes knows life is a roller coaster. And sometimes it’s good and sometimes it’s And when it’s good, you are thankful. And when it’s shitty, you’re like, well, at least it was good. And all of the bad luck that we didn’t get. I mean, we made it to two straight cups or we won two straight cups. We were healthy the whole playoffs last year for the most part. All of the bad luck that it that we didn’t get, all of the good luck that it took to win two cups, all the bad luck not happening that it took to win two cups is just all hitting us right now. It just is. And while we remain hopeful and we still feel confident in the team if if they get healthy, would anybody be surprised if like tomorrow morning we woke up and like Lundelle had like dropped a weight on his foot, right? Or like one of Babsk’s kids left the toy truck in the middle of the living room and he tripped and he fell. And I mean, would any of us be surprised at this point? Lucina is going to be out a month because he burnt himself at a barbecue. So sometimes in life, whatever the situation is, you just have to sit back, look at what’s happening, take a really good hit, you hold it in, and then you blow it out. And when it’s still a tornado, take another hit. and then you wait and you look around and if it doesn’t get better after that, you just go take a nap. That’s about where we are. We’ve had our second hit. We are now in last place. And so, we’ll see. We’ll see. And I’m sure there’s still going to be games and I’m aggravated and pissed off and we could win five straight and have Christmas in second place. It’s still all right there for us. But until we get guys back, this version of the team is basically what we’ve got. We can play a little bit better. We can play harder. I’m sure I we have to be able to play harder than this, right? I mean, I understand the talent level isn’t the same, but the effort or is it just the lack of energy from the guys that are on the ice? Are we just that crispy burnt from the runs to the cup? We’ll find out. We keep saying we’re going to find out. It’s still time. There’s still And it is. There is still time to remedy this. I know people saying the Blues in 2019 were in last place and then they came back and won the cup. So, everything is still there. Everything is still possible, but it’s difficult to watch. It’s hard. We’re not used to this. I mean, not recently anyway. You know what I mean? Um, but no, we don’t need to trade Babski. The core is still fine. We’re missing eight guys tonight. Seven or eight. I mean, almost half the team. It’s not even an exaggeration at this point. We don’t have one line out there that’s even remotely close to really what we would want it to be. Maybe Londell Marshan Reinhardt is you, but that’s about it. And so, I’m not going to panic. Not every night. There will be nights I will panic, but tonight ain’t one of them. We’re in last place. That’s it. There’s nowhere to go but up from here. Please go up from here. [Laughter] All right, that’s going to do it. Um, I’ll be live tomorrow at noon for your therapy session. Oh, it’s been good. It’s been a good run. It’s not over. But damn, I didn’t see last place coming. Not at Not at this point. They got to start finding a way to get some points in these games. I don’t I don’t losing the board battles and losing all of the battles and just just being unable to lift our energy level to the point to when the team plays the way Toronto did tonight with just giving us no time and space and they’ve got their energy about them. We have not had a response really at all when teams have played us that way. The first three games of the year we won and they were close there. And we could see we had a little bit of an issue when teams were playing us hard and giving us energy and we just haven’t had an answer for it the whole season. I mean 70% lost in the faceoff circle. It’s a mess. But it’s a mess in December. It’s a mess in December. So we’ll wake up tomorrow morning. will be in last place in the conference. And we’ll see if that wakes these guys up enough. You know, we’re not that far out. Four or five game win streak. We’ll be right back where we belong. And I understand how much hope that sounds like. So, all right. I’ll see you tomorrow at noon.

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