Panthers Demote Ellerby

The Florida Panthers demoted Keaton Ellerby to the AHL, sent Erik Gudbranson back to juniors, placed Marty Reasoner and Byron Bitz on the injured reserve and waived Nathan Paetsch on Wednesday to bring their roster down below the maximums before the deadline hit.

With all of those moves made, the Panthers now have an active roster of 21 players (22 if you still include Paetsch, who is awaiting his fate on the waiver wire), including 13 forwards, six defense and two goalies, which you can see below.

The player of note in the paragraph is the lead one, Ellerby, who is in Box 30 for the Panthers on the selection sheet.  Looks like he'll be starting the year in the AHL, so he won't be a good pick to start the year, but if the Panthers are in need of some injury help or a 7th defenseman, Ellerby will likely be call up number one.

Forwards	Defense	Goalies
Stephen Weiss	Bryan McCabe	Tomas Vokoun
Michal Frolik	Dennis Wideman	Scott Clemmensen
Steve Reinprecht	Dimitri Kulikov
Cory Stillman	Bryan Allen
Radek Dvorak	Mike Weaver
Rostislav Olesz	Jason Garrison
Steve Bernier	Nathan Paetsch
Marty Reasoner
Christopher Higgins
David Booth
Shawn Matthias
Byron Bitz
Mike Santorelli
Kendall McArdle
Darcy Hordichuk

In the Panthers case, I believe this team is holding a couple roster spots open for cap reasons, being a budget team and all. The 21-player roster, plus two buyouts on the books has a projected cap value of $47.6 million, which is safely in between the salary cap floor and ceiling, but also likely hovering around their franchise-determined budget.  I'm not sure if the amount has necessarily been announced, but if it wasn't a big deal, I would imagine they would carry an active roster of 23 players, instead of 21.

The Panthers are definitely looking a lot different from the team that finished off the regular season 14th in the Eastern Conference, but the jury is still out on whether or not they have actually improved upon themselves enough to jump into the playoff race.  Personally, I don't think enough has been done to do this and I imagine the Panthers are still going to be toiling near the bottom of the Eastern Conference, unless Bernier and Higgins can somehow capture some of that potential they had when they were much younger and turn that into a reality.  Depth at scoring may definitely be an issue.