Paul Maurice’s two training camps as coach of the Florida Panthers have been brutal. End-of-practice laps that leave most players doubled over in agony. Sessions on the stationary bike that tend to make people wobble. Days are long, demands are many, smiles are few and any praise is earned.
Everything has a purpose. And as the Panthers learned last year, there also can be a payoff.
The Panthers are coming off a season where they won the Eastern Conference, went to the Stanley Cup Final and shed any notion that the franchise can’t contend for hockey’s biggest prize. The journey to all that started in camp last fall, and Maurice almost took glee in making this year’s camp even tougher.
“The reinvestment,” Maurice said, “has to be made.”
The Panthers are entering this season with one goal, and everyone knows what it is. Florida’s season starts Thursday night at Minnesota, when the Panthers’ 56-year-old head coach – quietly, one of the most accomplished in NHL history — will resume his quest to finally get to hoist the Stanley Cup. He came close last spring. His mission now is to finish the job, and that’s why camp was again no cakewalk.
Much of the core of last season’s team — Matthew Tkachuk, Aleksander Barkov, Sergei Bobrovsky, Aaron Ekblad, Carter Verhaeghe and more — returns this season. Maurice didn’t have to spend this summer getting to know players and staff like he did after being hired by Florida in the summer of 2022. The system he spent a few months installing last season, with some growing pains along the way, is in place.
It was not easy to change the way Florida played the game. But like those rough camp practices, Maurice had reasons for doing what he did. And the results showed he made the right moves.
“Last January, I knew I had to get these guys to walk through a gate they don’t want to walk through,” Maurice said. “And then they did, and after that, it was just a whole hell of a lot of fun to come to the rink because you didn’t have to worry about anybody’s compete level. There’s absolutely no laziness here. I worked them so hard and they did the rest.”
Vegas wound up topping the Panthers in five games to win the Cup, but at least any questions about Maurice — an often-hilarious person who is unafraid to yell on behalf of his team, yell at his team also when necessary or to use a profane word or two or more for emphasis — were answered.
Then again, at this point, there shouldn’t have been many.
By the time this season ends, Maurice should be No. 2 on the NHL’s all-time games coached list behind only Scotty Bowman. (Maurice is fourth now with 1,767, one behind former Florida coach Joel Quenneville, 45 behind Barry Trotz and still a few years from catching Bowman’s total of 2,141.) Maurice enters the year sixth on the all-time win list; he should be fourth or fifth by next spring.
There’s only one thing missing from the resume. The Cup. It’s one of the reasons why he took general manager Bill Zito’s call and came to Florida, determined to change just about everything. So far, so good.
“Everyone pretty much knows what to do now and how to play,” said Barkov, the Panthers’ captain. “And obviously, systems are important. But at the same time we realize that no system is good if you don’t work hard and if you don’t play hard.”
Maurice said — probably only half-seriously — that he spent the first two weeks of his offseason crying about the loss in the finals. Then came the real work for the summer, some self-evaluation. What could he do better? What has to change? Why is he still doing this? He wanted the players to consider all that themselves, and felt like he had to ask the same questions.
It didn’t take long to find his answers. He trusts the players in the room. He respects their work ethic and their desire to win. He finds Zito — an Ivy League-educated man who is well versed on about a billion matters outside of hockey — fascinating to talk to regardless of topic.
And he still likes showing up to work every day. Camp wasn’t fun. Everything else seems to be.
“It’s just the most fun place I’ve ever been,” Maurice said. “If anyone asks me, ‘Why do you go to the rink?’ my answer is easy. It’s just a hell of a lot of fun.”
