Rats! Whether the Panthers play their next game at BankAtlantic Center in a couple of days or this weekend, one thing will be missing when they return: plastic rats for sale.

The plastic rats have been a symbol of the team since its run to the Stanley Cup Finals in 1996, and they have been on sale at the arena gift shop for $5 throughout these playoffs.

The Panthers’ organization has encouraged fans to throw the plastic rats on the ice at the end of victories, but that practice will end after the league requested the latest rat craze be scaled back.

A group of local investors including Tampa Bay Lightning owner Jeff Vinik has made an offer to buy the financially troubled Channelside Bay Plaza.
The group also includes Andrew Wright, CEO and founder of commercial real estate firm Franklin Street; and Anthony Everett, founder and president of Everett Realty Services. But the group has competition. “I know there are other bids,” Wright said, but adding he doesn’t know how many.
“We have finalized our partnership, but it’s a complicated process,” Wright said. “There is a lot of work to do. We are nowhere near a deal.”
Lightning spokesman Bill Wickett confirmed Vinik’s participation in the group but declined further comment.
Calls to the Tampa Port Authority, which owns the property where the waterfront entertainment complex is located, were not immediately returned.
The Tampa Bay Times, which recently extended its naming rights deal at the nearby hockey and concert arena, confirmed the makeup of the Vinik group on Thursday. Tampa Bay Business Journal first reported talk of the Bolts owner’s interest in the entertainment complex in December.

NEWARK, NJ – Vinny Lecavalier’s return to the lineup after an 18-game absence wasn’t spectacular, but it did serve the purpose of showing even though the season is about over, he isn’t packing it in.

With Tampa Bay teetering on the brink of playoff elimination, Lecavalier suited up against the New Jersey Devils at the Prudential Center on Thursday. It was his first game since injuring his wrist Feb. 18 against Washington.

His return came on the Bolts’ second shift when he was paired with Teddy Purcell and JT Wyman. The plan was to keep Lecavalier’s shifts short, which is why they generally lasted 30 to 40 seconds.

“The first few shifts were tough,” said Lecavalier, who reported no issues with his wrist. “Decision-making with the puck (was slow). A few times I made some decent thinking plays. The game felt a little faster in the first period but it got better as the game went on. It kind of slowed down. It’s been five weeks, but your decision-making gets a little quicker.”

One thing Tampa Bay coach Guy Boucher wanted to guard against was diminished returns by playing Lecavalier too much, or extending the time of his shifts.

“He played great,” Boucher said. “The first half he was flying, but as the game went on and he had quite a bit of ice time (he slowed down). I expected that. The second half you could see he was getting tired. It’s been a month.”

Prior to the injury, Lecavalier had 21 goals and 25 assists in 58 games.

BRANDON — A feeling of déjà vu might be starting to creep into the thoughts of Lightning center Steven Stamkos.

Last season, when Stamkos scored his 40th goal of the season on Super Bowl Sunday, he had a 12-goal lead on Anaheim’s Corey Perry for the league lead. But Stamkos went into a slump, finished with 45 goals and runner-up to Perry in the race for the Rocket Richard Trophy.

This season, when Stamkos scored his 50th goal on March 13, he had a 12-goal lead over Pittsburgh’s Evgeni Malkin in the Richard Trophy race. But Stamkos has not registered a goal in four games since – only the second time this season he has gone at least four games without a goal. That has once again opened the door for a competitor to sneak up from behind and grab a piece of hardware that seemed destined to be won by Stamkos.

Seemingly out of nowhere, Malkin has pulled to within five goals of Stamkos as the season winds down to the final two weeks, and Malkin has catching Stamkos in his thoughts.

“I want to score 50 goals,” Malkin told reporters after his two-goal performance Thursday against Nashville to give him 45 on the season.

On the same night Malkin had two goals on 10 shots, Stamkos had six shots and plenty of chances. But for Stamkos, it’s not about the lack of goals over the past few games or worrying about Malkin breathing down his neck for the Richard.

“I had lots of chances and try to stay as positive as I can,” Stamkos said. “If you’re not getting chances, then you start to worry. …It’s going to come sooner or later.”

But Stamkos will be the first to tell you he’s not in it for personal glory and individual trophies only come from team play.

“I’m more worried about producing so our team can win and, obviously, when I’m not, I’m not happy with myself,” Stamkos said. “This is something I obviously want to change. Losing is not fun.”

The late-season slump that occurred last season is a distant memory and there are no similarities to what happened a year ago compared to the mini-slump Stamkos finds himself in now, other than the fact pucks are hitting posts instead of finding the twine.

“To me, he got away from the things that allowed him to score last year, he’s not getting away from it right now,” Lightning head coach Guy Boucher said. “He’s right there and it’s a question of hitting a post and going in or the same deke and putting the puck in.”

If it takes a late-season push from Malkin to get Stamkos back in the scoring column, that’s fine, but it’s not the motivator.

“I think Steven is a lot more about what is going on here than what is going on in Pittsburgh,” Boucher said. “It’s not about Malkin and whether or not Malkin scores seven is not going to help Steve on the power play. Now, if it pushes him, good, but it’s not something that I’m going to talk to him about.”

“It’s nice to be back from a memory standpoint and to see everything,” said Khabibulin, the Lightning goaltender for Game 7 of the 2004 Stanley Cup final, a 2-1 victory against Calgary.

“It’s just a good feeling overall. You think about it as soon as you land, the airport is still the same and you get on the bus, a lot of the stuff is still the same and I remember a lot of stuff.”

Khabibulin, in his third season with Edmonton, will be in goal tonight against the Lightning at the Forum, his first time playing in the building since June 7, 2004.

He left Tampa Bay for Chicago as a free agent the season after the 2005 lockout. In his first trip to Tampa with the Blackhawks, then-Chicago coach Trent Yawney gave Khabibulin the night off. The past two times his teams were scheduled to play in Tampa – once with Chicago and in 2009 with Edmonton – Khabibulin was injured and didn’t make the trip.

Though he has twice beaten the Lightning since leaving Tampa – a 5-1 victory in Chicago during the 2007-08 season and a 4-3 shootout victory at Edmonton last season – Thursday marked the first time he faced his former team in the same building in which he helped Tampa Bay win a Stanley Cup.

“I didn’t think it would be that long, but it is what it is and finally I get the chance to start here,” Khabibulin said.

A Canadian icon could face extinction in the coming decades, researchers say.

A study by scientists at McGill and Concordia universities says rising temperatures are reducing the availability of frozen ponds, which eventually could mean the end of outdoor hockey.

The headlines are dire:

“Global warming could spell the end of Canada’s outdoor hockey rink,” reads one from the National Post.

“Thin ice: Canada’s outdoor rinks face meltdown,” reports The (Montreal) Gazette.

“Climate change melting backyard hockey rinks,” The Record in Waterloo, Ontario, says.

“Outdoor ice hockey could perish in some areas,” reads The Spectator in Hamilton, Ontario.

“Outdoor skating rinks threatened by climate change,” the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. reports.

The men behind the science are Lawrence A. Mysak and Nikolay Damyanov of McGill University and H. Damon Matthews of Concordia University.

They looked at data from 142 meteorological reporting stations across Canada from 1951 to 2005 and came to this conclusion: “We would expect all regions of Canada to see a decreased viability of outdoor skating under continued winter climate warming.”

And in the case of southwest Canada, the number of days where outdoor ponds are viable for skating, and, in turn, hockey, could be zero by the middle of the century, the scientists report in a paper published this week in the Institute of Physics journal Environmental Research Letters.

“It’s hard to imagine a Canada without outdoor hockey, but I really worry that this will be a casualty of our continuing to ignore the climate problem and to obstruct international efforts to decrease greenhouse gas emissions,” Matthews said in a statement.

Mysack hints that the fate of the nation is imperiled.

“The disappearance of outdoor hockey rinks and probably cross-country ski trails is not going to be good for the health of our youth and the leaders of tomorrow, who need all the exercise they can easily get,” he said in the statement.

Canadian media are surely as worried.

“Shorter Canadian winters could well mean no more Wayne Gretzkys,” The Record begins its story on the report. Gretzky is a four-time winner of the Stanley Cup as a National Hockey League champion and a nine-time winner of the Hart Trophy as the league’s most valuable player.

What did the outdoor hockey rink mean to Gretzky? Read on from the website gretzky.com.

“When he was 6 years old, his father, Walter, built a rink in the family’s backyard, and it was there that Wayne skated for hours on end, every day, practi(c)ing his skating, shooting and stickhandling and learning everything about the game from his dad.”

Of course, the researchers pretty much stoked that fire.

“Wayne Gretzky learned to skate on a backyard skating rink; our results imply that such opportunities may not available to future generations of Canadian children,” their study concluded.

And Matthews, in an interview with The Toronto Star, admits an agenda on what has been a politically divisive issue in Canada and around the world. Current Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper is an avid hockey enthusiast.

“It’s certainly a motivation for me in doing the study,” the Star quotes Matthews as saying.

“Canada is lagging behind the rest of the world” in efforts to fight climate change, he also told the paper.

But, at least to some Canadians, the decline of outdoor hockey is old news.

In its article on the report, The Vancouver Sun asks, “Is outdoor skating in Canada doomed to become what it always has been here in Vancouver: non-existent?”

And in a CBC poll on outdoor skating, the No. 1 response to the question “How has your outdoor skating changed in recent years?” is, “A lot. I can’t remember the last time we had a proper outdoor rink.”

He shoots! He sinks!

In January of 2010, high school hockey player Matt Brown of Norwood, Mass., broke his neck on a collision with the boards. The incident left him paralyzed from the chest down. It was 102 days before he was released from rehab to return home.

Brown has since become close with the Boston Bruins organization and their players, who have raised money for his treatment and equipment at the annual Matt Brown Gala, hosted by the Boston Bruins Foundation and the TD Garden. This year, the Foundation was able to provide Brown with a state-of-the-art wheelchair that allowed him to stand upright, and Brown debuted that wheelchair at Saturday’s tilt between the Bruins and the New York Islanders, dropping the ceremonial puck to a standing ovation from the 17,565 fans in attendance.

The new wheelchair will help Brown with day-to-day functions, as well as remedying some of the issues posed by the “sip and puff” wheelchair he was given in 2010, such as potential skin problems. “The wheelchair drives and tilts,” Brown said. “There is a button by my head to tilt. If I sip (on a straw attached to the chair) hard, it goes back, a hard puff drives it forward, a soft puff moves it right, and a soft sip moves left. It took a while to get used to.” Every 30 minutes he has to do a “weight shift,” where he tilts the chair back for two minutes. “It prevents skin breakdown,” Susan Brown, Matt’s mother, said.

Brown will also be using the new wheelchair to participate in the Boston Marathon, with the help of friend and Army Ranger Lucas Carr. Carr will push Brown’s wheelchair in this year’s Boston Marathon on April 16. The duo, which will join the Boston Bruins marathon team to raise money for the Boston Bruins Foundation, recently took part in the Hyannis Marathon. The Army Ranger pushed Brown from beginning to end and crossed the finish line in the time necessary to qualify for the upcoming Boston Marathon.