Major Deal out of the Sunshine State

This article may be coming a little late, but just over a week ago, the Florida Panthers completed a massive 21 player deal with the Buffalo Sabres. The deal saw roster players, prospects, picks and even a horrible contract switch hands in the enormous deal. The re-building Panthers obviously added many young players to continue the movement while the Sabres added some veterans for a playoff run and also some prospects and picks to keep the shelf full.

 A total of eleven pieces are heading to Buffalo. Sanderson, Branko and Leopold all are heading to the Sabres to add for their playoff push this year giving them depth at some weak positions. Also heading there are Pikkarainen, Tlusty, Gistedt and Dowell. Admittedly from the Panthers GM he said he struggled on dealing away Dowell as he seems to have a strong quality that would make him a perfect #3 for the future.  Though with a flurry of young centers coming through the pipeline it seemed they could make him expendable.  Also heading to Buffalo is a trio of prospects including Tulupov, Poulin and recently acquired Nick Ross.  They feel with the prospects they gave up, all had quality but were lower on their depth charts and were expendable to the team.

 Now what is heading to the hometown Panthers?  First off you might see a solid veteran d-man……..just don’t look at his contract, or you might cry. Wade Redden was packaged into the deal for cap reasons and coming along with him is 9mil a year.  Though with still $21 million in cap space and Reddens 4 assists in 5 games may help to take the blow. The big pieces heading to the team are top prospects Kyle Beach and Tyler Ennis.  Both are first round picks and add a lot of skill to the forward core. Ennis though being 5’9” has tons of hockey sense and skill which may help him beat his size.  Beach is a tough hard nosed player that has kept his actions in check this year while still maintaining his offensive skill which should make him into a potential top 6 power forward.

With this deal the future of the Top 20 prospect list was put in jeopardy.  But we will continue with it as it was set before and will maybe complete a separate article for the prospects just acquired.