GM Zito: Maurice ‘fantastic’ despite record
Bill Zito spent his first two years with the Florida Panthers in a honeymoon phase and he deserved it. In his first year as general manager, Zito transformed the Panthers from an afterthought into one of the best teams in the NHL by making a series of savvy free-agent pickups, including Anthony Duclair and Carter Verhaeghe. In Zito’s second year, Florida won its first Presidents’ Trophy, even after Joel Quenneville abruptly resigned because of his involvement in a decadeold scandal.
For the first time in Zito’s tenure, the Panthers are struggling this season and his magic touch is looking a bit more human. It started at the trade deadline last year, when Florida gave up two firstround picks to get Claude Giroux and Ben Chiarot, only to get eliminated in the second round of the 2022 Stanley Cup playoffs, and then have both leave in free agency. It continued into the offseason, when he took big swings with a blockbuster trade for Matthew Tkachuk and a surprising decision to hire Paul Maurice. Now, Florida is in real danger of missing the Stanley Cup playoffs for the first time in Zito’s tenure, sitting several points out of postseason position with less than 20 games left in the regular season.
“Sometimes,” Zito said Friday after the Panthers were the only team to stand entirely pat at the trade deadline, “you have to endure pain in order to achieve.”
Florida expected to take a step back this year because it has more than $6 million tied up in dead cap and it was trying to make a major stylistic overhaul, but this is still not something anyone in the organization saw coming. In the preseason, Maurice, who’s the losingest coach in
NHL history, said he was excited to finally be coaching a team where the challenge wasn’t going to be just getting to the Cup playoffs after years of leading rebuilds. When the Panthers traded star left wing Jonathan Huberdeau and star defenseman MacKenzie Weegar to the Calgary Flames for Tkachuk in the offseason, Zito touted a vision in which Florida would contend for championships for close to a decade to come.
There’s no simple, singular explanation for how this has all gone so horribly wrong for the Panthers. Injuries have certainly contributed, with captain Aleksander Barkov missing more than a dozen games, and fellow centers Sam Bennett and Anton Lundell, and star goaltender Sergei Bobrovsky all missing significant time. There’s an element of bad fortune, too, and Zito did point to Florida entering the weekend in the league lead in both shots and expected goals as evidence as to why he still believes in Maurice, 56.
This is the NHL, though, and coaches are often expendable — only three have been in their current job for more than five years — and so is Zito understandably facing tons of questions about his first-year coach as the Panthers are on the verge of missing the playoffs. He is not wavering on his plan.
“I’m so pleased with Paul on so many different levels,” Zito said, “and I believe that he’s the man to lead us to a Stanley Cup.”
On the day of the trade deadline, Zito was effusive in his praise of Maurice’s coaching job, and instead pointed to Florida’s cap constraints and injury issues as reasons why the Panthers are well below .500 so late in the year.
“I think it’s been fantastic,” said Zito, 58. “He came in trying to — I’m trying to think of the best words to use — harness the energy and put some of the team energy into defense, and structure and system, as opposed to more of a free-wheeling style, and that’s hard to do. It’s hard to teach, it’s hard to get people to buy in, to understand, to execute and then to execute it with excellence at a high level, and it’s a process.
“We’ve had a number of injuries to our stars . ... Those pay a toll, particularly when you have that $8 million deficit. That’s real. That’s tangible.”
The GM did admit the extent of the struggles have caught him off guard.
No matter how this season ends up, Florida is going to stick with its long-term vision. Virtually every player of significance — including Barkov, Tkachuk, Bobrovsky and star defensemen Aaron Ekblad and Brandon Montour — are under contract through at least next season, and the Panthers will have more than $11 million in cap space to use.
This year was always set up to be a transition year, to start transitioning Florida away from its old wide-open identity to — the organization believes — a more playoff-friendly defensive-minded style. It just was never supposed to get this rough.
“I certainly thought there was going to be growing pains. One thing that I’ve come to learn is change is a little more difficult that I would’ve anticipated,” he said. “We knew we were up against it with cap. We knew that sort of drag on our personnel was going to be real and be tangible, and it’s just something that we accepted and we were willing to deal with.
“The plan is just to go through the season and then see. If it’s prudent, do it. If it’s not, then hold off.”
David Wilson: 305-376-3406, @DBWilson2