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