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Dave Hyde: Panthers' bad-luck season doesn't need to find any luck now

Dave Hyde, South Florida Sun Sentinel on

Published in Hockey

If you’re a Florida Panthers fan studying this final stretch of games, your fear in a season where everything went wrong is there’s one final curse lurking.

Everything might, you know, go right.

They could win too many of these final, five games. The door prize to the Panthers’ star-crossed season would be a top-10 draft pick. That’s the kind of asset a two-time champion rarely gets. But the Panthers have to lose enough to qualify for that top-10 pick or the they lose it altogether to Chicago.

They might look safely out of trouble in the sixth draft spot right now. But they’re only one point from ninth and two points from 10th. Besides, does anyone really want to tempt fate in a season where Aleksander Barkov was lost in the first practice and Eetu Luostarinen missed weeks after a grill mishap?

Every Panthers fan who’s cheered Stanley Cup parades the past two Junes is in the odd position of rooting for them to lose right now. That surely includes general manager Bill Zito, though there isn’t enough truth serum for him to admit it.

It’s hard enough to write: The Panthers need to tank. There. I did it. I’ve written in recent years how tanking is immoral, unconstitutional and will accelerate a free world’s descent into nihilism. But this is the asterisk to all that

Although you should never enter a season to lose, once that season’s sunk, it’s OK to tank if the prize is big enough. A top-10 pick qualifies.

“They’d have a real opportunity in this draft,’’ said Craig Button, a draft analyst for the Canadian network TSN and former NHL general manager. “You want scoring centers? There’s centers. You want defensemen that offer different elements for what they add and give team? There’s a smorgasbord.”

And if they fall out of the top 10?

“How unlucky would that be?” Button said.

It would crack the list of the top five unluckiest, living names:

— Ronald Wayne. The forgotten, third founder of Apple. He brought in Steve Jobs. He then sold his 10% share of the company for $800. It’s now worth $20 billion. Whoops.

 

— Pete Best. The Beatles drummer for three years, he was then replaced by Ringo Starr when the group was on the doorstep of fame.

— Craig Bierko. He turned down the role of Chandler Bing on Friends. His friend, Matthew Perry, took the role. You’ve heard of actors regretting roles they turned down, but they’re famous. Did you ever hear of Craig Bierko?

— The 1994 Montreal Expos. They held the best record in baseball when a strike canceled the season, leading to the dismantling of their roster and their moving to Washington.

— Archie Manning. Good quarterback. Bad teams. His 35-104 record over 13 seasons is the worst among quarterback with 100 starts (his genes were pretty good, though).

Come to think of it, the Panthers should invite someone off the list to their final home game against the New York Rangers. Maybe some of their bad luck is just what this season needs to close out properly. Have a black cat run across the pregame ice, too. And have fans walk under ladders entering the arena.

Think of it: Eight of the Panthers’ top players will be over 30 by next season’s start, too. So, a talented kid could help keep this run going.

“When you have that group like the Panthers have, they can really help (a rookie) learn and grow,’’ Button said. “You’re not having to thrust him into a big role. That’s a good position for a young player.”

This isn’t the way anyone expected this season to go, the Panthers suffering so many injuries they couldn’t make the playoffs. But these final, five games starting Tuesday night in Montreal aren’t irrelevant. Three are on the road. Two are against similarly draft-conscious Toronto and the Rangers.

Don’t even ask what could go wrong in a season where nothing’s gone right.

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©2026 South Florida Sun-Sentinel. Visit sun-sentinel.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

 

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