Bright future
Team owner acknowledges past personnel mistakes
Panthers owner taking more active role with team.
On a picturesque May afternoon, far removed from the desired rigors of a postseason run and the ghosts of decisions past and the franchise tumult that has speckled recent Florida Panthers history, Vinnie Viola is greeted by the echoes of the Atlantic Ocean.
The sounds of a coastal breeze and the distant murmur of beachgoers are muddled by the hum of soft jazz music and the traffic along Fort Lauderdale Beach Boulevard, steps from where Viola sits at a square table in an upscale restaurant. The collar of his lightblue dress shirt is open. His sleeves are rolled up his forearms. His graying hair gently peaks above his forehead. A glass of red wine rests in front of him. His voice is casual and conversational, controlled and cautious.
The scene is increasingly familiar to Viola, now five seasons into his ownership of the Panthers and a new resident of South Florida. Five months ago, Viola and his wife Teresa moved to Fort Lauderdale from New York, stepping closer to his hockey team that missed the
playoffs by one point last season and hasn’t won a postseason series since 1996. The locale allows the Violas customary morning walks on the beach and opens the 62-year-old billionaire up for a bigger role in the Panthers franchise.
But Viola’s involvement with the team has been divisive to parts of Florida’s tortured fan base.
“First of all, you have to understand one thing,” Viola said in an interview with the South Florida Sun Sentinel, “I assume complete responsibility for everything that went right and went wrong since we bought the team. Obviously, we want to be a Stanley Cup contender. We’re not. How do you build trust? I think you’ve got to do it over time. To the extent that we’ve lost it, we work hard every day to get it back.”
Under Viola (and minority owner Doug Cifu), the Panthers enjoyed their best regular season in franchise history, piling up 103 points and a division championship in 2015-16. They’ve signed young franchise cornerstones Aleksander Barkov, Jonathan Huberdeau, Vincent Trocheck, Aaron Ekblad and Mike Matheson to sizable contract extensions, and Viola’s presence was crucial in trading for Roberto Luongo.
They secured their place in Sunrise through a deal with Broward County. They’ve been visible and impactful in the community, helping heal after Hurricane Irma ripped through the state, and then following the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.
Also under Viola, though, the Panthers endured the failed reign of Tom Rowe as both general manager and interim head coach in 2016-17. They nudged GM Dale Tallon aside, then welcomed him back. They fired coach Gerard Gallant. They dumped Reilly Smith’s contract and Jonathan Marchessault’s production to Vegas, reuniting them with Gallant and sparking the expansion team to the Stanley Cup Final.
In the process, two playoff-less seasons were lost — one when the front office shuffled, and another under first-year coach Bob Boughner. Career years from Barkov, Trocheck and Huberdeau ended again in the second week of April.
“We want to win the Stanley Cup, that’s why we’re here,” Viola said.
Viola labels himself a hands-off owner, one that can step back and let his subordinates do their jobs. He envisions emulating Tampa Bay Lightning owner Jeff Vinik, who took over the struggling cross-state franchise and morphed the area into a hockey-mad region with a conference powerhouse on the ice. (“He’s been fantastic in helping us to try to, if you really think about it, we’re trying to do what he did in Tampa,” Viola said.)
While Viola deems himself a laissezfaire owner, the past couple years offer two glaring examples of intervention. There was the ill-fated promotion of Rowe to GM in May 2016. Months later, there was the dismissal of Gallant after a loss to the Carolina Hurricanes that preceded the infamous cab ride in Raleigh.
In discussing both occasions, Viola operated in abstracts, preferring to describe the periphery of the events instead of the detailed thought process that went into them.
In promoting Rowe and bumping Tallon to president of hockey operations, Viola hoped for a more familiar business structure, with Tallon assuming a Chief Executive Officer-like role in hockey operations and Rowe acting like a Chief Operating Officer. Rowe would handle day-to-day duties inside hockey operations and with the coaching staff (“blocking and tackling,” as
Viola called it), while Tallon still maintained control over personnel decisions.
Viola cited “input from the people that were involved” in reaching that conclusion.
“No personnel decisions were to be made without Dale’s approval,” Viola said. “When Dale approved it, he would have a conversation with me. Everything that happened. Every single thing that happened, Dale knew about and approved every single thing.”
The Panthers traded a pair of popular defensemen (Erik Gudbranson and Dmitry Kulikov) and replaced them with Mark Pysyk and the long-term contracts of Keith Yandle and Jason Demers. They signed little-known forwards Colton Sceviour and Marchessault, plus extended Trocheck and Smith. They lured backup goaltender James Reimer with a salary that paid him like a starter.
Things changed over that summer, but the moves didn’t end there. Twenty-two games into the season and in late November, the team dismissed Gallant, the popular and successful third-year Florida coach.
In defending the firing, Viola was succinct if not political in dodging any depth. As Viola tells it, the organization wasn’t working properly and a recommendation to change coaches was made — somehow turning a franchisealtering moment into a simple transaction.
“I think it was really a case of an unintended consequence of a series of breakdowns of communication,” Viola said. “That’s how I would describe it. By the time it got to me, it was kind of untenable. I had to make the best decision I could.”
The Jack Adams Award is annually given to the NHL coach who contributes the most to his team’s success. Gallant finished as the award’s runnerup in 2016. He is the heavy favorite to win it when the NHL awards are announced next week. In between, the Panthers fired him.
As the season was derailed, in part, by injuries and the Panthers finished 14 points out of the playoffs, Viola returned the reins to Tallon. Tallon hired Boughner, resetting the franchise after a one-year experiment.
Viola rejects the perception that the moves happened because he was too involved. Instead, he maintains that the decisions were made because he wasn’t involved enough.
At the time, he lived in New York. He focused on the business side of the franchise, the marketing, the sales, the sponsorship. He helped with community outreach. But on the hockey side of the organization, he “was a little bit too extracted.” Viola wanted to be more aware of what was happening on the ground level because “the communication wasn’t what it should have been.”
With the move to South Florida, Viola is no longer removed from the team, an adjustment team president and CEO Matt Caldwell called “a huge help.” Viola attends meetings at the BB&T Center when necessary. He’s present at team practices in Coral Springs and its games in Sunrise.
Viola said him and Tallon have “much, much more regular communication,” beginning last season, a change from when Viola felt he failed Tallon by not being available enough. He cited Caldwell’s added oversight of hockey decisions (beginning about a year ago) as an improvement of communication.
More actors may be included, but Viola — the U.S. Army veteran, financial firm founder and horse-racing enthusiast — said he’s learned from the lessons of two years ago.
“Yeah, I learned that in hockey, you need to have one guy running the operation, period,” Viola said. “You can’t divide duties around specific responsibilities. It’s a little different than the environments that I come from.”
For now, Viola’s current environment involves simply enjoying life in Fort Lauderdale.
He’s relishing the ease of life in South Florida, the sea bass and the loin at Terra Mare and the future of the Florida Panthers. He’s moved past the fiascos of the past two seasons, and allows himself to dream of finally, at last delivering a winner to South Florida.
“We rebooted in the middle of a rebuild,” Viola said. “That’s hard to do. We lost at least part of this year to new systems, new coaches. But it seems like we are, as an organization, we are moving in the right direction.”
“We rebooted in the middle of a rebuild. That’s hard to do . ... But it seems like we are, as an organization, we are moving in the right direction.” Vinnie Viola