On the prowl

When it comes to the Florida Panthers, you certainly won't hear any complaints from me. Year after year, this team has been one of the best in the league when it comes to signing autographs.

Yesterday's trip to Tampa to hound the Panthers only reinforces this point. Aside from Nathan Horton, who apparently found an alternative route to the St. Pete Times Forum, the only time a player didn't stop yesterday morning was when he wasn't asked.

Bottom line, kids: It's teams like Florida that make collecting fun. Granted, the Panthers may not be the best team in the league (yet), but they sure know how to gain fans.

As usual, my primary focus was to add pucks to the collection. And, at morning's end, another dozen joined the club. This season, though, I'm trying to build upon the diversity of items within the collection.

Florida's Craig Anderson helped this effort, becoming the first American-born goalie to sign the stick shown above. With any luck, I'll add Boston's Tim Thomas, Buffalo's Ryan Miller and the Islanders' Rick Dipietro, among others, this season.

Florida's Olli Jokinen and Jay Bouwmeester also pitched in, adding to this working Young Guns (for the lack of a better term) stick, a well-used Easton Synergy bought a few years ago from the AHL's Manchester Monarchs. Boston's Patrice Bergeron and Carolina's Eric Staal were the first to sign this item, back during the NHL lockout when they were playing in the AHL.

Please know, too, that I'll update these stick pictures in the days ahead. It's hard to get good scans of curved surfaces.

Pucks, shown at top: Top row - Bryan Allen, David Booth and Radek Dvorak; Bottom row - Mike Van Ryn (now, that's a letter-perfect autograph, if you ask me), Noah Welch and Richard Zednik (who signed an Islanders puck over a Panthers puck).