Panthers’ MacKenzie Weegar opens up about costly ‘f—k-up’ and why a long summer is ahead
MacKenzie Weegar tried a little bit of everything last month to try to change up on the mojo on what was quickly becoming a nightmarish 2022 Stanley Cup playoffs.
He beat himself up after a ill-timed turnover in the Florida Panthers’ first-round series let the Washington Capitals steal Game 1 in Sunrise. He chopped off most of his hair after a botched assignment in the final seconds of Game 2 in Round 2 let the Tampa Bay Lightning score a game-winning goal with 3.8 seconds left at FLA Live Arena. The star defenseman couldn’t help himself: Every time he started to move on from one miscue, another one set him back again.
“I took it really hard,” he told former NHL players Scottie Upshall and Shane O’Brien on the “Missin Curfew” podcast last week, and his assessment of his second mistake was especially harsh. “After my Game 2 [expletive]-up there I said, Enough with the hair there. I’m seeing hair in the sink, I’m seeing hair in the shower. I’m like, This is enough. Hopefully, it can change the series, which it didn’t.”
The Panthers, of course, got swept out of the second round of the Stanley Cup playoffs a few days later and the Lightning are now playing in the 2022 Stanley Cup Finals.
A lopsided series like the one Florida played against its in-state rival in May means there was no one player or one moment to blame for what happened, yet it has not kept Weegar, 28, from feeling like he was to blame.
If the Panthers don’t give up the last-minute goal in Game 2, then maybe then win in overtime and maybe if they win overtime to tie the series, then they give Tampa Bay a real fight.
Instead, Weegar is in the early days of what is shaping up to be a long offseason and not just because he’s still thinking about the myriad ways he cost Florida goals in the Cup playoffs. His contract status — he’s about to enter the final season of a bargain three-year, $9.8 million deal — also complicates his future with the only NHL franchise he has ever known.
“As tough as it is and as long as a summer it’s going to be thinking about that stuff,” Weegar said, “I think I will get better from it. ... It’s a learning experience for me. I’ve still got to get better, I still want to get better and I still have a lot more left in me.”
Even though those too-frequent playoff mistakes made for an awful ending to his 2021-22 NHL season, Weegar continued an unlikely ascent to stardom this year. After he finished eighth in voting for the James Norris Memorial Trophy last season, he spent all of this regular season playing on the top defensive pairing.
When Weegar was playing with Aaron Ekblad, the star defensemen formed one of the best pairings in the league, with Florida scoring 55 goals when they were on the ice together for 5-on-5 action — the fifth most of any pairing and they were the only group in the top five to play fewer than 1,000 minutes together. When Ekblad got hurt and Weegar had to play without him, the Panthers didn’t suffer, and Weegar’s pairing with fellow defenseman Gustav Forsling was even better, in terms of expected goals percentage.
As a former seventh-round pick, Weegar’s emergence as a legitimate top-pairing defenseman has been crucial to Florida’s transformation into a Stanley Cup contender, especially since he was only the 10th-highest paid player on the team this season.
At some point soon, Weegar won’t be underpaid anymore. As Weegar enters the final year of his contract, general manager Bill Zito will have a decision to make at some point: Will he try to extend him now, let him play out the final year of his deal or try to trade him to recoup some future assets and make sure Florida doesn’t risk losing a star for nothing?
Zito said last month he’d like to work on extensions for players in the summer before they hit free agency, much like he did with star center Aleksander Barkov last year.
“We’re going to address those one-year-out guys in the same fashion,” the GM said. “We’ll get on those this summer.”
Any of the three decisions would be defensible: Weegar is young enough to be a cornerstone player, good enough now to help a Cup contender as essentially a one-year rental and thought of highly enough around the league for the Panthers to potentially restock some future Draft capital via trade after they dealt away three first-round picks in the last year.
All three decisions also have obvious drawbacks: Extensions for Weegar and All-Star left wing Jonathan Huberdeau would probably leave Florida with more than half its cap space tied up in five players, a decision to do nothing would carry the risk of the Panthers losing Weegar for nothing and a trade would be something of a betrayal of the win-now, all-in attitude Zito has displayed.
If Florida is able to trade star goaltender Sergei Bobrovsky as Toronto radio station CJCL reports the team is aggressively pursuing, then the Panthers’ cap crunch becomes much easier to manage. If not, Weegar is one of the best assets the Panthers have and a pivot piece in this offseason.
Wherever he’s playing next year, don’t expect the long locks back, though.
“I like the new hair a lot more,” he said. “I don’t know if the long hair will ever come back.”
