Made in Helsinki: How Finland put Panthers GM Bill Zito on path to NHL glory

Credit: Panthers General Manager Bill Zito places the Stanley Cup on a table on Wednesday August 14, 2024 at Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee, Wis.

Imagine the scene. It’s the late 1980s. Bill Zito just wrapped an undistinguished playing career at Yale University and wanted to find a way to stay in the game before attending law school.

He had a (literal) one-day tryout in hockey-scarce England before getting cut. He bounced around playing in the Netherlands to Belgium before packing up his gear and spending time in Rome as a tourist, when he got a call from a third-division team in Finland – barely professional hockey – that was looking for players.

“Why not?” Zito recalled saying. “It was an opportunity to play.”

If you told Zito then that 35 years later, he’d be bringing the Stanley Cup to Finland this week as GM of the defending champion Florida Panthers to play two games against the Dallas Stars in the 2024 NHL Global Series, he’d have laughed you out of the bar in Salo.

“No way. C’mon, I mean, there wasn’t even a team in Florida,” Zito said. “It’s ridiculous. And a bit surreal.”

The wide eyes of kids will be fixated on one of their heroes in Zito’s captain, Aleksander Barkov, who is returning to play in his hometown of Tampere. But Zito’s connection to Finland is a lesser known origin story, a place where he cut his teeth in the agent business and where a mindset rubbed off that led him on a path to becoming a Stanley Cup champion architect.

By 1995, Zito graduated the University of Wisconsin Law School, practised law and founded Acme World Sports as a hockey agent. He met another Finn, Markus Lehto, at the World Juniors that December in Boston and a partnership was born. Lehto was looking for a North American partner for his business, and Zito was in search of a European partner – a mutually beneficial combination for the right people at the right time.

Zito didn’t want to just take Lehto’s word on a prospect. This was before digital video and instant communication. He wanted to see it and live it, so he rented a small apartment in Helsinki – furnished with the help of Lehto’s wife – and commuted back and forth between Finland and New England pitching and placing clients.

“I learned so much from the guys in the rinks in New England, Rick Dudley and Paul Fenton and Ace Bailey, and they were so good to me,” Zito said. “But Helsinki was an incredible place to work and watch hockey. They had three teams in the Liiga at the time in Helsinki alone and you could watch a game every single night.”

Zito was already close then with HIFK GM Jarmo Kekalainen, and Zito and Lehto represented nearly half of Kekalainen’s 1998 championship team. It was Kekalainen who would later lure Zito out of the agent business and into an NHL front office with the Columbus Blue Jackets in 2013. Kekalainen, Lehto and fellow agent and business partner Simo Niiranen all vouched for Zito in the Finnish hockey scene.

“I think a lot of people were flattered that an American guy wanted to learn about Finnish culture, wanted to spend time there to pursue a dream in the NHL,” Lehto said.

“Those guys gave me a level of hockey credibility that I didn’t otherwise have,” Zito said.

Zito was a rink rat. In Helsinki, he skated in a men’s league in the morning with globe-trotting FinnAir pilots, then bopped around rinks in Switzerland and Sweden playing good-cop/bad-cop with Lehto in negotiations with GMs across Europe. It’s probably a bridge too far to say that time in Finland served as Zito’s agent apprenticeship, but it’s undoubtedly a place his eyes were opened to a whole different perspective on hockey.

“I can’t overstate what my Finnish friends have done for me,” Zito said. “It’s probably the most unique hockey culture in the world. The amount of time, energy and thought that they put into development and teaching the game, the elite level of training, the technical part of the game. They welcomed me into that.”

By the late ’90s, Zito and Lehto amassed an enviable client list on both sides of the Atlantic: Brian Rafalski, John Madden, Tuomo Ruutu, Sami Salo, Kimmo Timonen, Valtteri Filppula – and they begot future stars such as Tuukka Rask and Ville Leino.

It was in Finland that Zito began to challenge the notion of a traditional path to the NHL. He recruited Tim Thomas out of the University of Vermont in 1997, then convinced Thomas to take a four-game tryout with Kekalainen’s HIFK team. Thomas passed the test and posted a .947 save percentage in 18 games with HFIK on the way to that ’98 championship that put him on the map as an NHL prospect. Thomas needed five more stints in Europe before he finally broke through with the Bruins, leading Boston to their first Stanley Cup in 39 years in 2011.

“I think it helped him a lot to understand different paths, but also European players and how they think and their values,” said Lehto, who still works in the agent business with Wasserman. “He really got into players’ heads and how they feel and the big culture change, because we know that players can’t be their best they can be when they aren’t comfortable. I think that’s helped him a lot as a general manager.”

Finns are notoriously stoic and Zito has carried a part of that mindset with him all these years later. On their recent run to the Cup, Panthers executives would fist bump before playoff games and say “Sisu,” a uniquely Finnish word that doesn’t have a direct translation to English, but encompasses the character of the country. In essence, Sisu is temerity in the face of impossible odds, to never stop or never quit, to never back down when met with adversity.

The odds probably felt impossible at times for Zito. It wasn’t just a longshot to become a GM. The Milwaukee native dreamed it when he was a batboy of the 1982 American League champion Brewers and was encouraged by Brewers GM Harry Dalton that being an NHL executive could be a real possibility. From Yale to Finland and back, then Columbus, and to get that shot in Florida? The Panthers had never won and spent most of the past two decades as an empty arena meme. To step in and turn that around, that is Sisu personified.

And so, when the Panthers link up with the Stars in Tampere this weekend, in the crowd will be four to five of Zito’s teammates from that SalPa hockey club in Salo that no longer exists. They’re bringing with them the now 80-year-old rink manager who gave them ample ice time, a guy who speaks not a lick of English, to see the NHL team run by the American kid who opened his heart and mind to Finland and became one of their own.

“It’s a tremendous privilege,” Zito said. “Simply an honor.”

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Made in Helsinki: How Finland put Panthers GM Bill Zito on path to NHL glory

Article presented by Fountain Tire

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