Paul Maurice, I’m sorry I ever doubted you.
Three decades after getting his first taste behind an NHL bench, Maurice is a deserving Stanley Cup champion. And I have a lot of egg on my face.
I didn’t think letting Andrew Brunette go after a Presidents Trophy-winning season was the right decision by the Florida Panthers. And I definitely didn’t think Maurice was the right answer behind the bench.
I made a mistake. Completely wrong.
That’s obvious now, very clear in retrospect. But it wasn’t so obvious then, not with some of the narrative surrounding Maurice when he was hired, a narrative that Maurice completely turned on its head.
At the time of being hired, Maurice had officiated 1,685 games and had won 775 of them. His teams played at a rate of 86 points on average and in 24 seasons he only had one 100+ point season on his resume. Only two others above 95 points. Maurice’s teams made the playoffs nine times and only four times did he make it past the first round.
Some might blame his rosters for that, but at the time that seemed a bit revisionist considering what he had for most of his time in Winnipeg. The criticism of Maurice was that he rarely felt like he got the most out of his teams.
Midway through Maurice’s first season in Florida, that thought seemed prescient.
Coming off a 122-point season, the Panthers started the year with a lot of enthusiasm. The bookies pegged them at 105.5 points and my own projections were at 105.9.
The Panthers were expected to be one of the best teams in the league. Instead, they were the most frustrating in the league: all that talent and no results to show for it.
That’s what led to this tweet being posted on January 11, 2023 at 12:01 am and it has since been featured prominently and rightfully on Cold Takes Exposed because of how hilariously wrong it turned out.
Firing Andrew Morena, who led the Panthers to the damn President’s Trophy, and replacing him with Paul Maurice is a bad decision.
— dom 📈 (@domluszczyszyn) January 11, 2023
The timing of the tweet is important for context: It came just after the Panthers blew a 4-1 third-period lead in less than six minutes to the Avalanche. That was after losing 5-1 to the Stars two nights earlier and going 9-13-3 in their previous 25 games. Florida fell out of the playoffs with a record of 18-19-4, and while they ultimately ended up winning that game, they looked terrible in the process.
It wasn’t just a matter of analytics, either. At the time, the Panthers had the fifth-best expected goals rate in the league, were top 10 in power play opportunities for and 12th in penalty kill opportunities against. Their underlying numbers were solid, as you’d expect from the roster, but they didn’t feel right. They weren’t getting results (12th in five-on-five, 18th in power play, 20th in penalty kill) and they didn’t seem to deserve them, either. That’s something that seemed to be a long-standing problem with Maurice’s teams (with a few exceptions). I probably should have relied more on the numbers — a perhaps amusing phrase coming from me.
At the time, the Panthers’ chances of making the playoffs were 40 percent, up from 95 percent previously. They remained in a high position despite their record due to the quality of the squad, but at the time they looked like a team that was hard to believe in. Combine that with how good the Winnipeg Jets looked at the time (a brilliant 26-14-1 record) and Florida’s problems seemed to fall squarely on Maurice’s shoulders.
That’s pretty much the exact moment everything started to fall into place. Sometimes a team and a coach need to hit rock bottom to start moving toward the top and change the narrative.
After losing their next game 4-2 to Las Vegas (the last game they lost in regulation after entering the third period with a lead), the Panthers did not spend another day below .500. They bounced back to 23-12-4 the rest of the way, a 105-point pace. His results also ultimately lined up with 56 percent of five-on-five goals (fifth) and 8.4 goals per 60 on the power play (10th). The penalty kill was still an issue, but offensively the Panthers were finally looking like the Panthers.
You know the rest: A Cinderella run to the Stanley Cup Final in 2023. A 110-point season in 2023-24. Another run to the Stanley Cup Final in 2024. And a job finished on June 24 with Maurice’s Panthers winning the Cup.
And, of course, being completely and happily wrong about Maurice.
A more stubborn man might say that the Panthers were good enough to win the Cup regardless of the coach, that they would have made it to the promised land anyway thanks to the team’s talent. Maurice himself joked about it before the final. “I showed up here and they had 122 points. I managed to get them down to 92 in one year. Brilliance.”
Perhaps a Panthers championship was inevitable. Maybe not.
We’ll never know for sure, but I personally don’t think so. I don’t think the Panthers will make it to back-to-back Finals without Maurice and I don’t think they’ll win them this year without him.
Some teams just don’t seem to have what it takes to win the big game or go all the way. Some teams don’t seem to play the right way. Unfortunately, the Panthers had both things going for them before Maurice took over. Obviously, trading Jonathan Huberdeau for Matthew Tkachuk also helped (and hey, at least he was right about that), but over the past two years, it’s clear that Maurice’s fingerprints are all over the place for the Panthers to finally figure it out.
The 2021-22 Panthers may have won the Presidents Trophy, but they were a team that thrived on trading opportunities, rushing attacks and dominating offensively. When games became closer, they didn’t have the flexibility to attack or defend the cycle.
Maurice changed the DNA of Florida.
Throughout the playoffs, the two main talking points about Florida’s success were how unstoppable the Panthers felt and how strong their defensive game was. Neither was true before Maurice’s arrival and both became key elements of the team’s identity.
Changing your identity can be an arduous process, which does not happen overnight. That’s where a lot of the frustration from the first half of the 2022-23 season came from: It didn’t seem like it was working. It seemed like the Panthers had veered too far in the opposite direction, down a path that could cost them a playoff spot entirely. He almost did it.
However, that patience toward an aligned vision of what would actually work come the playoffs was rewarded. It’s a vision that may have come from the top, but it required Maurice to be the man to achieve it, apply it tactically and get an attack-minded, rush-based squad to buy into it.
That’s hard to do when things aren’t working, but once they got past the best regular season team in history, the floodgates opened for the Panthers. Maurice pulled it off when the odds were against him in more ways than one.
After winning the Cup, it became very clear how big of an impact Maurice was to all the players in the squad, who were not shy about recognizing how vital he was to the cause. That group would break through a wall for Maurice and that’s what they did every game with that fierce forecheck.
Before arriving in Florida, there was a narrative that Maurice couldn’t get the most out of his rosters. That couldn’t be further from the truth with his Panthers, who proved to be the best versions of themselves under his tutelage. The right man just needed the right equipment for the job and he finally found the right one for him.
That was hard to see when things weren’t going as expected, but it’s now clear as day with Maurice’s journey with this team now clearly reflected in the rearview mirror. He flipped the script, changed his story for the better, and got the ending he so richly deserved: a Stanley Cup. Maurice’s perseverance over the past 30 years is nothing short of remarkable and it is beyond impressive that he has finally been able to get to this point.
After watching his vision develop over the past two years and how he got his team through hell to reach hockey heaven, I have nothing but immense respect for Paul Maurice, a man who now looks like one of the best coaches around of the league and a man who is, at last, a champion. A man who proved him flatly wrong.
(Photo: Jim Rassol / USA Today)
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