Is Paul Maurice the right man at the right time for the Florida Panthers?

It’s been 20 years since Paul Maurice coached an NHL team to his one and only Stanley Cup Final.

It was the first time I can recall meeting Maurice and listening to him talk about coaching and the game, and what he believed in left a lasting impression – that and a strong Windsor, Ontario connection.

Maurice has rarely been out of the NHL game since his Carolina Hurricanes were defeated by a star-studded Detroit team in five games in the 2001-02 final. And wherever he has gone since, Toronto, Carolina a second time, Russia, Winnipeg, there has been a constancy about the way Maurice connects to players and fans and the media, a connection that is deep and strong and rooted in his ability to convey in almost perfect tone and tenor the nuances of the game.

Twenty years later and that unique, infectious way of sharing his passion for the game, of talking the game, was on full display Thursday as Maurice described the emotions of taking on the head coaching job in Florida with the Panthers.

It is a curious hire at a curious time for the Panthers, who might well be the most interesting team in the NHL. And when has anyone ever said that about the oft-maligned Cats?

In many way, how Panthers GM Bill Zito and their new head coach described the challenges ahead might have been repeated in any one of a dozen NHL markets. The goals and hopes and dreams mirror that of every team in the middle ground between expansion squad, rebuilder and defending Cup champion.

You believe as an organization you’ve got the right tools to vault up the ladder. But do you have enough?

You have high expectations. But are they expectations or just hopes?

You believe you are just one or two moves away from completing the elusive Stanley Cup puzzle. Or are you making changes for the sake of change alone?

The Panthers took a giant step forward last season under head coach Joel Quenneville and pushed eventual Stanley Cup champion Tampa to six games in a fast, hard, often violent first-round series. I talked to GM Bill Zito in the fall about what was learned from that encounter and how it drove the organization to get better, how they believed they were ready to learn from that experience when it mattered most.

He wasn’t wrong, although the path the team followed was hardly what anyone expected.

Quenneville was forced to resign in disgrace early this season when his role in the Chicago Blackhawks’ sexual assault coverup n 2010 was revealed and assistant coach Andrew Brunette took over as interim head coach.

Brunette did a stellar job as the Panthers won their first Presidents’ Trophy and along the way became the highest-scoring team during the regular season in a generation.

Brunette was a finalist for the Jack Adams Award as coach of the year. But in the playoffs, Brunette’s inexperience seemed to catch up with him. The Panthers narrowly escaped a first-round series against Washington, winning in six games, then were steamrolled by Tampa in four games, scoring just three times.

I talked to several veteran NHL executives who felt the Panthers would simply use that as a learning experience and that Brunette would return to take another run with the talented Panthers in 2022-23 better equipped for the task.

But the Panthers felt otherwise.

One long-time executive described this as an over-correction, something that you might see a team like Toronto do, except there isn’t anything close to the pressure to correct in South Florida that there is in Toronto.

But kudos to Zito and the management team in Florida for taking the time to really assess what went wrong and more importantly how they envisioned the future of this team.

That they did not see Brunette as head coach as part of that future was the hard decision.

Chicago did the same thing early in the 2008-09 season, firing Denis Savard four games into the season. Quenneville, the second winningest coach in NHL history, went on to win three Cups as the Blackhawks head coach.

So, credit to Zito and his staff for going with their beliefs. Now they just have to be right about all of it. And that brings us back to Maurice. This team is too good, too talented, too close not to have the right coach behind the bench. But the problem is, you never know until you know who that person is, right?

Is Maurice that guy? Zito believes in his heart of hearts Maurice is that guy.

“As we looked to the future and we really, really want to take the next step are we all, as an organization, willing to collectively…and every single day believe in the process?” Zito said at Thursday’s briefing in South Florida. “And that starts with us, right? Every single day we have to work. You can’t take for granted we’re having this success, we’re so good. We have to keep going, we have to keep going and part of that is looking at the horizon and we need to prepare and we need to be ready and we have to anticipate where are headed right now. I think that’s the biggest takeaway for us. And so that’s where I really believe that Paul has, you can tell, the special enthusiasm, his experience in hockey, we’re going to have some challenges this year and I think that this is a great fit for us to move forward and take ’em head on.”

And so the clock is ticking on the Florida Panthers the way it always does for talented teams that have yet to translate that talent into something tangible like playoff success. It ticks on the Cats just as it did on Washington before its first-ever Cup win in 2018 and for Pittsburgh after it failed to advance to a final between 2009 and 2016 and so on.

Hiring Maurice doesn’t change that. The clock would have been ticking marking the rising expectations of fans, ownership, the media whether it was Maurice or Brunette or anyone else behind the bench. But with this decision the focus is now squarely on Maurice, a coach who shockingly walked away from his last post with Winnipeg on Dec. 17.

Funny, as he was describing what led him to make that gut wrenching decision to walk away from the Jets coaching job he’d held since midway through the 2013-14 season, I couldn’t help but feel it also provided a cautionary tale for what is ahead in Florida.

“So you push hard, you push hard, push hard and you get this big return the first time you pushed that button and every time you push that button is slightly less return right? It’s a little harder to drive it,” Maurice explained.

“Even though, God, those players never quit, they worked hard right to the end, I know that I wasn’t producing at a level that I expect myself to produce. I expect myself to have an impact in the room and be able to change things and be able to push things. And I didn’t feel I was having that effect,” Maurice said.

And so he felt the Winnipeg Jets deserved more than he was giving them and so he walked away. Now he walks in the Florida Panthers’ door believing that he can be that coach, can be that driving force. And he knows that the sands are already running through the hourglass just as they slipped away in Winnipeg and, before that, Carolina and Toronto.

“Unless you’re winning Stanley Cups or driving right to that edge all the time, I think a coach’s window is five or six years to be honest with you,” Maurice said. “Now, if you win Stanley Cups, you can stay forever. But when you’re in this window you have to drive and you have to push and at some point they needed a different voice (in Winnipeg). Now hopefully there’ll be Stanley Cups here and we can talk this about this six, seven eight nine years from now. Who knows?”

Is Paul Maurice the right man at the right time for the Florida Panthers?

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