Panthers make 7 picks and re-sign 2 players, but don’t solve their cap issues at NHL Draft
Bill Zito and the Florida Panthers had a busy couple of days in Montreal this week. They made seven picks Friday on the second and final day of the 2022 NHL Entry Draft, re-signed two of their more promising young skaters, and dove into negotiations with Jonathan Huberdeau and MacKenzie Weegar about potential extensions.
Still, they’ll return home to Sunrise this weekend with plenty of work to do before free agency begins Wednesday.
The NHL Entry Draft is always supposed to be about the future, but there was a distinct possibility the Panthers’ week in Quebec would create more clarity about Florida’s present. Instead, the Panthers face a tighter cap crunch than ever after using their two days at the Bell Centre to exclusively to draft players and trade future picks -- and re-sign two impending free agents.
Of course, Zito and Co. fielded calls and took advantage of the in-person format -- it was the first in-person NHL Draft since 2019 -- to talk face-to-face with executives from other teams, but seven prospects are the only tangible new takeaways from Florida’s time in Canada.
The Panthers sat out Day 1 of the Draft on Thursday after they traded their first-round pick to the Buffalo Sabres for Sam Reinhart last year and sat out Round 2 after they traded their second-round pick to the Calgary Flames for fellow forward Sam Bennett, then made seven selections in the final five rounds -- they picked twice in the sixth and seventh rounds -- to round out Day 2.
Zito was pleased with the haul -- Florida took Czech defenseman Marek Alscher in Round 3, Swedish defenseman Ludvig Jansson in Round 4, Latvian right wing Sandis Vilmanis in Round 5, Canadian left wing Joshua Davies and American goaltender Tyler Muszelik in Round 6, and Canadian center Liam Arnsby and American right wing Jack Devine -- even if it won’t really have any effect on Florida’s ongoing push for a Stanley Cup in the near future.
“We didn’t have the high picks,” the general manager said, “but we managed to get guys who were all very high on our list.”
As the Panthers’ only pick in the first half of the Draft, Alscher is the potential prize. At 6-foot-3 and 196 pounds, he could develop into the sort of physical, defensive-minded defenseman Florida is missing with its young core.
“It’s somebody who can hopefully continue to grow and become one of those reliable minute-crunching guys, log big minutes,” Zito said.
He and every player picked, however, is 18 and likely won’t join the Panthers for something like four years or more. The main priority for this offseason has always been improving the roster for the 2022-23 NHL season and little of what Florida did this week will affect the upcoming season.
A few smaller moves will, though. Before Day 2 of the Draft kicked off Friday, Florida officially inked center Eetu Luostarinen to a two-year, $3 million deal and defenseman Lucas Carlsson to a one-year, $800,000 deal. Those two will help the Panthers next season -- Luostarinen is among the best fourth-line centers in the NHL and Carlsson could wind up competing to be the sixth defenseman, depending how the rest of the offseason goes -- yet it only further highlighted the cap crunch Florida is now trying to navigate.
With less than five days until free agency begins, Florida has less than $775,000 in cap space available.
As several of the league’s other best teams spent the week dumping their most onerous contracts on non-contenders, the Panthers returned to the United States with right wing Patric Hornqvist -- and his $5.3 million cap hit -- still on the roster. Some sort of trade involving the 35-year-old Swede -- or even just a release -- remains the most straightforward way to open up room to fill out the roster next week.
Unrestricted free agents can begin discussing with other teams Saturday, even though they can’t officially sign deals until Wednesday.
Florida would like to bring back Claude Giroux, although it might take even more than just dumping Hornqvist’s contract to make room for the versatile All-Star forward. Winger Mason Marchment is the other unrestricted free agent high on the Panthers’ list of priorities to bring back.
The only trade Florida made during the Draft came toward the very end of the last day, sending their seventh-round pick in the 2023 NHL Entry Draft to the Pittsburgh Penguins for the Penguins’ seventh-round pick this year. The Panthers used the extra pick to take Arnsby, who was already the captain of the North Bay Battalion in the Ontario Hockey League last year and has the “high leadership, high compete, high grit and compete,” Zito said, Florida valued enough to trade back into the Draft to get him.
“It’s something that we need to continue to get better at continue to have throughout our lineup,” Zito said.
Even for a team trying to win now, the Draft still matters, both because it will theoretically build up the depth an organization needs to compete for years to come, but also because these are the chips who one day might be needed to complete a trade.
If the picks the Panthers made pan out, they’ll only give Florida more leverage to compete while its window is wide open.
“It’s best player available and it’s been a theme that I think we established in the first draft when I got here,” Zito said. “It’s carried on through the whole time.”
