After days (weeks?) of speculation, the official announcement was made Monday morning that the Florida Panthers had hired former NHLer Bob Boughner as their next head coach. This comes following a season where they had some turmoil both behind the bench in Florida and curbside in Carolina.

Simply pegging The Boogieman as a former NHLer doesn’t really do him justice. He coached the Windsor Spitfires in the OHL for several years, including two Memorial Cup wins. He was also briefly on the Columbus Blue Jackets coaching staff before spending the last couple of seasons with San Jose running their blue line.

More than anything, just providing some stability is going to be big for the new coaching regime. As mentioned earlier, there were a lot of issues with Gerard Gallant and Tom Rowe last year. Switching coaches can be a good thing – Pittsburgh! – but not having a clear vision for the team, as well as the plethora of injuries, made the 2016-17 campaign pretty much a lost season.

Extensive experience working with younger players is going to be an asset for the new Florida coach. The core of this team – Aleksander Barkov, Jonathan Huberdeau, Aaron Ekblad, and Vincent Trocheck – are all under 25 years old. Beyond his work with Windsor, coming from San Jose means he knows how to value the puck. That seems like an obvious, yet vague, statement, but he’ll know what it means to be efficient with possession, how to activate defencemen in all three zones, and just generally how to play in the modern NHL.

Fantasy Impact

Given the team’s underlying results weren’t horrific with all that happened behind the scenes, and injuries on the ice, there should be a lot of optimism for this team. I wonder two things with Boughner:

1. Is he going to bring San Jose’s power-play concepts to Florida? They ran four forwards and one defencemen on a heavily-used top PP quintet. There was nearly a full minute separating their fourth- and fifth-most used power-play forwards last year. That was not the case in Florida, as Barkov and Thomas Vanek – first and eighth in power-play minutes per game – were separated by fewer than 40 seconds (yes, Vanek arrived to the team late in the season). Whether it was four forwards and one defenceman or three forwards and two defencemen, the time was more or less even between the top two units. That wasn’t just due to injuries, either, as the same thing happened in 2015-16. If Boughner indeed moves to a heavily-used top unit, that gives a lot more fantasy value to those top five guys, and hinders the value of everyone else.
2. How does he use his goaltenders? The assumption is that Las Vegas doesn’t scoop up Roberto Luongo in the expansion draft (he has five years left) and that they will be going into the season with he and James Reimer as their tandem. Injuries played a factor, but 2016-17 saw Luongo play his fewest games in a non-lockout season since his rookie year back in 1999-2000. He was fine with a .915 save percentage, but that is not the level we have been accustomed to. Do they run him as their starter? Do they split starts, riding the hot hand? Assuming this team improves -and they should – their goaltenders will be in a good situation to succeed. If neither starts 50 games, however, their upside fantasy-wise is capped. We may not get an answer to this question until the season starts.

This is a team definitely on the rise. The core is young, they have some vets to help them along, are solid in net, and now have a consistent voice behind the bench. If they adopt a new power-play structure, guys like Barkov and Huberdeau could be in for very good fantasy seasons.