Florida Panthers Fire Gerard Gallant

“Once it was 3-2 he made four or five good saves”.

Four minutes later, Aaron Ekblad doubled the Panthers’ lead on a freakish pinball goal, an innocent-looking point shot that Jaromir Jagr swung and missed at in front of Michael Leighton, off whose glove the puck bounced and trickled into the net.

Rowe said he met with the team briefly on Sunday night and planned to meet with captain Derek MacKenzie and assistants Jussi Jokinen and Aaron Ekblad at their Chicago hotel Monday afternoon.

Goodrow, 23, played in 14 games for the Sharks last season and recorded three assists.

Even while being appreciative of the chance to help Carolina get back on the winning track following successive 2-1 losses to Montreal and Ottawa, it didn’t start well for the 35-year old veteran. Stalberg cut the lead in half at 5:21 of the second, beating Reimer glove-side. Center Jonathan Toews, the team’s star captain, has missed the past two games because of an upper-body injury and is questionable to play against the Panthers.

Although this is a tremendous opportunity for Rowe as a first-time National Hockey League coach, he didn’t seem too joyful in his comments to the media on a conference call Monday afternoon.

Despite seizing control, Carolina still had to battle to close it out. The first two goals were kind of fluky. Peters did not have an update on Staal’s status following the game.

“They were pretty blunt”, forward Vincent Trocheck said.

It puts the pressure on Rowe and his group to produce results. How had he gotten to this point? He said he wanted to especially apologize to Ware and Banner, their families and anyone else affected by his actions. I think anybody wants to be treated with respect, and when you treat people with respect, you get the respect back. That’s stuff good teams do.

One of the reporters, outside of the arena had mentioned to him that they thought he had done a good job with the Panthers, he responded by saying, “I thought so too“. “Especially the way we played, we felt unfortunate that we didn’t come away with any points in those last two games”.

Gallant spoke after the game as always, talking about how five poor second-period minutes out of 60 was the team’s undoing against the Hurricanes, a game in which Florida wasted an early 2-0 lead. And we’ve been at a high level at home prior to going on the road. “They’re very aware of that and they fixed it”.

Viola must have been projecting pretty bad numbers going forward for Gallant and, for some reason, the team owner sees 60-year old Tom Rowe as the answer in what will be his first gig as an National Hockey League head coach.

During his time with Florida, Gallant had a win-loss record of 95-65-25.

The Florida Panthers chose to change direction with the surprise firing of successful coach Gerard Gallant Sunday night and general manager Tom Rowe takes over on an interim basis when they visit the Chicago Blackhawks on Tuesday.