The Florida Panthers made another bold move last week by trading AHL players with the Edmonton Oilers. I wonder what bright light lit up inside Dale Tallon’s mind when he looked at the Panthers atrocious power play and lack of offensive fire-power and then decided to trade Steve Pinizzotto and Jack Combs for Ryan Martindale and Derek Nesbitt.

Okay, okay, i’m just kidding. I know Tallon is just trying to make sure our boys coming up through the AHL aren’t playing on a losing team, and we got some pretty good players in return. But the Panthers need work.

And with Tallon recently pouring a few nourishing words into Panthers fans starving ears upon his announcement to the media that Vinnie Viola had given the green light to spend to the ceiling cap, I think every Florida Panther fans heart fluttered with excitement when they first heard there was a trade. Unfortunately, the trade hasn’t had any foreseeable impact on the Florida Panthers roster, nor is it the kind of blockbuster trade that should turn the San Antonio Rampage into perennial contenders.

It’s hard to tell if this trade addresses a problem or reveals a bigger problem; has Dale Tallon assembled a Florida Panthers roster full of players that have no trade value? Looking back to earlier in the season, he essentially had to pay the Blackhawks to take half of Versteeg’s contract even though he received two NHL hockey players in return. The fact that two NHL hockey players in exchange for Kris Versteeg alone wasn’t deemed a fair enough trade frightens me when I think of how much we’d have to pay to trade a guy like Tom Gilbert.

I understand that trading players we had to suck for an entire season to get via the draft is not the solution to rebuilding a franchise, but surely Tallon should be able to find trade value for people like Shawn Matthias, Krys Barch, and Tomas Fleischmann. And if he can’t find any teams willing to put these players on their team, maybe that’s sheds a little bit of light on why we are a losing franchise.

I know Dale Tallon might deem it wise to wait until the trade deadline to make any moves so he can get more value from teams looking for that extra boost in the postseason, but Panthers fans deserve more than what we are getting out of the team right now and making us wait until we miss the playoffs is absolutely preposterous when we’re playing the way we are.

If we judge Tallon – and the rest of the gang that thought Club Red was a good idea – based on their actions instead of their words, the message that Dale Tallon and the Florida Panthers organization is sending to the Panthers fan base is clear: “You are investing your time and energy in a defective product and you’ll have to wait a long time before we fix it.”

When’s the last time that was ever an appropriate way to treat your customers disenchanted by bad service anyway? Where else in the world could you go where that is an appropriate response to low quality performance? Can you imagine receiving a defective meal from a restaurant and yet still returning again and again after the manager tells you that “you are investing your time and energy in a defective product and you’ll have to wait a long time before we fix it” in hopes that one day your meal will taste like a meal from a five star restaurant?

This actually sounds a lot like the definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

Unfortunately for me, that loud and resounding message is clearly not enough to keep me away from paying attention to the Panthers squad in my free time. Even though we are one of the regular bottom feeders of the NHL, I really, really hope that Dale Tallon can reward us with a free dessert a high scoring power forward down the road for making us put up with the worst power play in the league and another year of mediocrity.