Florida Panthers show some promise in expensive season of failures

It’s that time of the NHL season where a few fan bases start buying playoff tickets while the rest turn their attention to MLB spring training. Elimination is no fun. But it shouldn’t color your whole fandom with tears. Just most of it. Seventy percent of it.

This is the 30 percent: SB Nation NHL Silver Linings, where we send hockey’s eliminated teams into the offseason with five good things to remember from this season.

The Florida Panthers, of all teams, spent $200 million on free agents last offseason.

Most of them were praise-worthy. That’s a big check to write, but at the time it seemed like the Panthers knew what they were doing.

Funny how sports pulls rugs out from under your best intentions. Few things went right for the Panthers in 2016-17, a year removed from the best season in franchise history. They fired their coach two months into the season. Players were hurt or regressed. A concussion kept Aaron Ekblad from top form for months.

And yet, they were still in the playoff race deep into the final stretch. That’s just one of a (very) few things to hang onto as the Panthers face an offseason of uncertainty.

It’s pretty tough for a NHL coach firing to make national headlines. After all, no league cans its coaches more often than the NHL. But when it looks like you dumped your coach and left him waiting for a taxi on a road trip ... yeah, that’ll grab attention.

Gerard Gallant’s firing was probably inevitable. If reports are to be believed, the new forward-thinking front office in Sunrise wanted a coach that adhered to their vision and the players they acquired over the offseason. Tom Rowe isn’t the answer there (he’ll go back to GM duties next season), but he certainly kept the ship afloat. Florida got healthy and threatened the playoff race for a moment there, a testament to the resiliency of the whole franchise.

Huberdeau missed two-thirds of the year. Barkov missed some time, as well. When they returned in February, the difference in the Panthers’ swagger was obvious.

Huberdeau put up 23 points in 27 games, on pace for 70 points over a full season. He’s essentially a top-20 scoring player in the league since returning from injury. Barkov has 52 points in 61 games and hasn’t stopped scoring since the All-Star break.

You have to think Florida is still in the playoff hunt if they get full seasons out of those two.

Hard to say if Reimer is the heir-apparent to Roberto Luongo’s starting job when the elder goalie retires, but he’s earning a shot at it. Florida locked up Reimer with a big contract last offseason, and he delivered with a 2.60 GAA and a .917 SV%.

The record didn’t match those numbers, but there’s enough there to believe the 29-year-old could be a pretty good No. 1 as the Panthers rise to contention.

Nobody blinked when the Panthers signed the 5’9 winger from the Lightning last summer. And why would we? Marchessault’s career-high for goals on a talented Tampa Bay team was seven last season, and the 26-year-old seemed too old even to become a late-bloomer.

So much for that. Marchessault is a goal away from the 30-goal mark, a height only 22 NHL players have reached so far this year. His eight goals are the lone bright spots on the Panthers’ 23rd-ranked power play.

It’s not a great sign that Marchessault is the leading scorer on a team with Barkov, Huberdeau, Jaromir Jagr, Reilly Smith, and Jussi Jokinen.

But the latter three failed to show up this year. Jagr’s 27-goal season a year ago feels like an anomaly after this 16-goal campaign. And 15 goals from Smith and 10 from Jokinen is both unacceptable and odd. One or both of them should return to form next year, and if they re-sign Thomas Vanek then the odds that the scoring wealth gets shared go way up.