Subscribe
Follow Us
The Florida Panthers are on a quest to go for the 3-peat, and one of the first steps in making that happen is to bring back their key players who have helped them win the first two. With free agency recently opening, there were doubts that the Panthers could bring back the entire trio of Sam Bennett, Brad Marchand, and Aaron Ekblad.
General manager Bill Zito proved the doubters wrong, and he was able to re-sign all three players. After all the talks that claimed he couldn't do it, he shared his thoughts on their early free agency success.
“I say this respectfully, but sometimes we are privy to information that either you guys don’t have or don’t understand, and there’s a lot of times we’re privy to things in the sense that this is what we do pretty much all day, every day, is plan,” Zito said via Pierre LeBrun of The Athletic.
“Because I don’t play. I don’t coach. We’ve got nothing else to do. So we plan. And in our planning, we always thought if we could get the numbers here, we could do it. There was (cap) room — I don’t know why people thought there wasn’t,” Zito continued.
With three key players back in the fold for the Panthers, the rest of the league should be prepared for them to be contenders once again next season.
Panthers re-sign key players in quest for 3-peat
If the Panthers weren't going in next season as favorites to win the Stanley Cup again, that should have changed after they were able to re-sign Bennett, Marchand, and Ekblad. Not many people are quite sure how Zito was able to pull it off, but the Panthers brought back three key players that will help them on their quest to win their third championship in a row.
“This is a special group of people,” Zito said via Nicholas Cotsonika of NHL.com. “It’s a special environment, and these three guys, in particular, understand and value and appreciate the opportunity. Even though they’re significant contributors to it on their own, I think that they’re aware that they make the group better and the group makes them better.”
Zito noted that it wasn't all on him to bring those players back, but it was their desire to come back and want to compete for a championship. With these moves, it looks like the Panthers are back in the driver's seat.
