Sports

/

ArcaMax

Dave Hyde: Panthers, looking for ultimate success, rely on many whose careers have seen rough patches

Dave Hyde, South Florida Sun-Sentinel on

Published in Hockey

There are struggles all over the ice for the Florida Panthers. Doubts. Questions. They’re anywhere you look on the roster. Doubts, questions, even full-on failure.

Yes, after consecutive losses to Edmonton, if you’re the Panthers, you’re confident of one thing:

Your players’ paths show they know how to overcome outside doubts and public questions. It’s embracing success that’s the issue now. But doubts? Failed hopes?

Coach Paul Maurice has been fired three times, resigned a fourth, and, for all the mentions of him as the fourth-winningest coach in hockey history, he’s also the all-time losingest coach. At 57, he knows what’s at work in a best-of-seven series, even as he faces the toughest moment of his career in pushing this team over the top.

“You win or you learn,’’ he keeps telling his players of this playoff process

Losing is more educational than winning in sports. They all know this, of course. Look at their journeys. Carter Verhaeghe was not playing at minor-league Syracuse, a few years into a blah career, when he went to his coach and said, “Put me in and we’ll start winning.” Syracuse started winning. Verhaeghe still holds the franchise’s point record.

 

Gustav Forsling was traded by a couple of teams, then cut by Carolina before he became one of the league’s top defenseman. “I never lost confidence in myself,’’ he said, even as everyone deciding on his career did.

Evan Rodrigues, Ryan Lomberg and Sergei Bobrovsky weren’t drafted. Think of Bobrovsky’s path for a moment. He was from Siberia and came to a new country to a Philadelphia team where he was slotted to be the third or fourth goalie and built a career from there.

Even then, he was benched two years ago in the playoffs for rookie Spencer Knight and didn’t start in the last playoffs over career minor leaguer Alex Lyon. The whispers were his contract would be bought out and he would finish his career in Russia.

Then he led that run to the Stanley Cup last year and was a favorite for the Conn Smythe award as the NHL’s most valuable player in the playoffs until these past two games. Now the doubters are there again. The whispers are there for all of them, right from the top with the question about Aleksander Barkov’s two meh games against the King of the North, Connor McDavid, about if he’s tough enough for this moment.

...continued

swipe to next page

©2024 South Florida Sun-Sentinel. Visit sun-sentinel.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Comments

blog comments powered by Disqus