Monday, April 14, 2008

Panthers Now better?


1) The Florida Panthers announced this past weekend that head coach and GM Jacques Martin will only be handling one of those jobs going forward. The team announced that Martin, the coach for the past 2 seasons and GM for this past year will only be the team's GM and the search has begun to find his replacement.


2) Seems Panther owner Alan Cohen got this one half right. He would have been best served to sever ties with the perennially underachieving coach once and for all. Martin's GM credentials aren't impressive. To be fair he really hasn't had to do much. The team was largely assembled by his predecessors. That said, we believe that it would have made eminently more sense to wipe the slate totally clean and bring in an experienced GM who could then hire his coach and move forward.


3) As we have written countless times on here, the Panthers are actually a very talented club missing a piece or two, and probably in need of the proper coach to get the most from this assembled talent. The past few seasons that has NOT occurred. It remains to be seen who Jacques will hire, but that small change alone might be worth the 5-6 points which would make the difference between playing or watching hockey in mid April. We will stay a top of this story and hopefully for long suffering Panther fans Martin makes a good choice. We're not confident.

4 comments:

amber mac said...

I didn't think Jack did that ba a job. We had our share of injuries early that hurt us. I think we will be the team that surprises the league next season.

Jibblescribbits said...

I don't know, he seems to have upgraded the Panther's talent:

He went out and got Vokun, which was a great move.

he picked up solid, if not spectacular signings of McLean, Zhitnick, and didn't cave to trading Jokinen. Not great, but not all bad.

FAUX RUMORS said...

1) Amber: A lot of teams had injuries that still made the post season
2) Jibblbe: Vokun had a nice season but in reality it was only a modest upgrade from the stats of the previous season's starter(Belfour)
3) Zhitnik is on Atlanta. Did ya mean Zednik? As far as Jokinen, the rumours out of Florida is that the owner himself stepped up and prevented Martin from trading him.
4) We agree that his GM grade is incomplete, but certainly his coaching resume is not. We just would have made a complete break and hired a totally new management team.

Antzmarching said...

ANY team devoid of JACK Martin is better off... I have been saying for years that Florida has much more talent than their output on the ice shows... They have had stellar goaltending the past two years with MACE and Vokoun... Jokinen and BOW-MISTER are stars at their positions and Horton is exceptional... JACK had to go...

 
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