There goes the season. 17 out of 32 owners were deathly afraid of seeing this on SportsNet every night for the next three weeks and that's all she wrote for the Panthers. Brunette will probably coach the two games in this B2B road trip as they scramble to find someone to take over on a more permanent basis and have a new coach hired for Thursday.
The options out there are NOT good right now.
There's Tortorella, and I don't think they hire him, for a variety of reasons. First, Tortorella is all about Tortorella, and he is totally the opposite of Quennville's in both style and strategy. He's also notoriously feuded with multiple players on the Panthers roster, most notably Bobrovsky. Bobrovsky is currently playing like he wants another Vezina, so hiring Torts would be a Steve Ross level blunder.
There's Gabby Boudreau, who is great if you like losing playoff series. Given that we're kind of tired of losing first round playoff series, this hire would be pretty bad, in my opinion.
Rick Tocchet? I mean, between his past legal troubles and his losing record as a head coach? Yeah, no thanks.
Claude Julien maybe? We're just absolutely reaching now. Guy has health problems and hasn't led a playoff team since 2014.
Basically, the Panthers just got hosed, royally. Tortorella seems like the only guy available on a moment's notice who has the chops, but he's totally wrong for the personnel. If we didn't have Bobrovsky on a 7/70 NTC contract, then maybe. But we do, so shut the door on this one, boys.
