Coach Joel Quenneville just wants Panthers to get playoff shot. ‘We had great momentum’
The Florida Panthers entered the NHL’s ongoing COVID-19 stoppage last month three points behind the Toronto Maple Leafs for the third and final playoff spot in the Atlantic Division, and coach Joel Quenneville wants to make sure everyone remembers the margin was actually even slimmer.
The night before the NHL suspended play indefinitely, the Maple Leafs upset the Tampa Bay Lightning in Toronto to move three points ahead of the Panthers with one extra game played. If they had lost to the Lightning, the Maple Leafs would have sat behind the Panthers in terms of points per game. The same would have been true if Florida had gotten to play and beat the Dallas Stars on the day the NHL halted its regular season.
“That’s how close it was going into it,” Quenneville said, “and that’s how close it could be coming out of it, as well.”
For the first time since the season screeched to a stop, the coach spoke publicly Tuesday in an interview with Doug Plagens, the Panthers’ play-by-play announcer for WQAM. Plagens read questions presubmitted by members of the media, who wondered how Florida is handling a season in limbo because of the coronavirus pandemic.
While he didn’t explicitly throw his support behind any particular restart possibility, Quenneville made it clear he wants his Panthers to get a chance to keep playing once the league is given the all-clear to return, whether it’s in an abbreviated regular-season finish to sort out of the final postseason spots or an immediate jump to an expanded Stanley Cup playoffs.
“I think from where we’re at, we’d really be in a good spot if we did get the chance to play playoff hockey, whether we’ve got to play ourselves in or we start where we’re in with a different kind of a format,” Quenneville said. “I thought we had great momentum.”
Florida entered the stoppage more than a month ago riding a two-game winning streak, including a 2-1 road win against the Western Conference-leading St. Louis Blues in its most recent game. After the Panthers lost 13 of 18 coming out NHL All-Star Weekend, Quenneville felt Florida had gotten back on track. He compared the Panthers’ current predicament to the one they faced going into the 2020 NHL All-Star Game — Florida won six in a row going into the break, then fell apart with more than a week off and tumbled out of playoff position.
“It was a good education going into this process we’re in today that we didn’t play the right way,” Quenneville said. “We’re eager to go because I thought we made some good strides in some areas this year, but we know that let’s make sure that we come out of this stretch with a much better approach than we did coming out of the All-Star Game.”
NHL playoff possibilities
The NHL has still not made any official decision about how play might resume, although commissioner Gary Bettman said last Tuesday it “may not be possible” to finish the regular season. The commissioner didn’t elaborate on how the playoff format might be affected, but he did acknowledge the plight of bubble teams like Florida, which was scheduled to face seven non-playoff teams in its final 13 games.
“We had seven teams on the bubble and they all think they would have had a chance,” Bettman said on NBCSN. “We’re considering every conceivable alternative to deal with whatever the eventuality is.”
Some of the potential scenarios include keeping the playoffs as is with the typical 16-team format only in a neutal site like North Dakota or expanding the field. Expanding to something like 20 or 24 teams with some sort of play-in round would let those seven “bubble” teams in without the field growing too diluted. A small expansion would make room for the Panthers to reach the postseason for the first time since 2016.
No matter how the league returns, some sort of training camp will be necessary. Bettman said Monday on CNN the players would likely need two to three weeks to ramp back up to playing shape.
“Which would be enough time,” Quenneville said, “whether we’re resuming the regular season or some type of format where who knows if we would be in or not, but we optimistically would be thinking like that.”
