{"id":490647,"date":"2026-02-26T01:39:08","date_gmt":"2026-02-26T01:39:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/490647\/"},"modified":"2026-02-26T01:39:08","modified_gmt":"2026-02-26T01:39:08","slug":"nhl-trade-buzz-panthers-have-very-important-week-before-deadline-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/490647\/","title":{"rendered":"NHL Trade Buzz: Panthers have \u2018very important week\u2019 before Deadline"},"content":{"rendered":"

Florida Panthers<\/p>\n

Panthers general manager Bill\u00a0Zito said this week will determine how he approaches the Trade Deadline, and potentially a push for a third straight Stanley Cup championship.<\/p>\n

Florida returns from the break for the Olympic Winter Games Milano Cortina 2026 with back-to-back games against the Toronto Maple Leafs on Thursday (7 p.m. ET; SCRIPPS, TSN4, TVAS) and the Buffalo Sabres on Friday. Then, after a day off, they visit the New York Islanders on Sunday, the start of a four-game road trip.<\/p>\n

“This is obviously a very important week,” Zito said. “We may have easy answers, or easy questions to answer, at the end of it. Or we may have real difficult ones, I don’t know. I will be watching every game.”<\/p>\n

The Panthers (29-25-3) are eight points behind the Boston Bruins for the second wild card into the Stanley Cup Playoffs from the Eastern Conference.<\/p>\n

Florida has six players who can be unrestricted free agents after the season — forwards A.J. Greer<\/a>, Cole Schwindt<\/a>\u00a0and Luke Kunin<\/a>, defenseman Uvis Balinskis<\/a>, and goalies Sergei Bobrovsky<\/a> and Daniil Tarasov<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Or, if they want to add, one option to open space under the salary cap would be putting center Aleksander Barkov<\/a>\u00a0on long-term injured reserve because of a knee injury, but that would eliminate his potential chance to return during the playoffs.<\/p>\n

“There is any number of scenarios that may present themselves,” Zito said. “We just have to be poised to make decisions for each of the fact patterns that are presented to us. And we will.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Florida Panthers Panthers general manager Bill\u00a0Zito said this week will determine how he approaches the Trade Deadline, and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":490463,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[66],"tags":[385,99],"class_list":["post-490647","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nhl","tag-nhl","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/490647","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=490647"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/490647\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/490463"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=490647"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=490647"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=490647"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}