Bill Zito’s risks pay off for Panthers. GM reflects on season

It was almost midnight Friday and the bowels of Scotiabank Stadium were still buzzing with gleeful Florida Panthers. Nick Cousins and Matthew Tkachuk cracked jokes in front of a horde of reporters. Teresa Viola, the wife of the owner, waited outside the locker room to congratulate every player who passed by. No one was exactly in a rush to get back to the team hotel, where they wouldn’t hold a team dinner until well after midnight.

In the middle of it all, Bill Zito smiled and took a few minutes to chat with anyone who approached. The general manager is the architect of the best story in the NHL right now — the No. 8-seed Panthers, who just barely squeaked into the 2023 Stanley Cup playoffs, are now going to the Eastern Conference finals after upsetting the Bruins and Maple Leafs in back-to-back rounds — and there was pride in what Florida accomplished with its series-clinching 3-2, overtime win.

The path was not the one anyone expected. The outcome, at least so far, is.

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“The team had gone through so many obstacles — [Aleksander Barkov] going down and everyone getting sick, the schedule was a bad schedule because of the All-Star Game — and they all can be excuses,” Zito said Friday, “but they can also explain a little bit.”

The Panthers’ last 12 month have been packed with years’ worth of drama. Saturday marked exactly one year since they beat the Capitals to reach the second round of the Stanley Cup playoffs for the first time since 1996, and then they promptly got swept out of Round 2 by the Lightning and a tumultuous offseason began.

Florida let former interim coach Andrew Brunette, who was a finalist for the Jack Adams Award, walk away and hired coach Paul Maurice as his replacement. The Panthers traded away star left wing Jonathan Huberdeau — at the time, the leading scorer in franchise history — and star defenseman MacKenzie Weegar to get superstar right wing Matthew Tkachuk from the Flames. Florida, a year removed from winning its first Presidents’ Trophy, stumbled through the first half of the season and was nine points out of a playoff spot after Christmas, and then somehow regrouped to make the Cup playoffs in the last week of the regular season.

In between, the Panthers were also the only team in the league not to make a move in the month ahead of the trade deadline; benched Sergei Bobrovsky in favor of fellow goaltender Alex Lyon, a 30-year-old career minor leaguer; and watched Tkachuk blossom into a finalist for the Hart Memorial Trophy.

“It’s a little self serving and a little, Let’s go back in history and say, Oh, I thought it all out,” Zito said. “Anytime there’s change … you never really know what’s going to happen. I think it’s too easy to say, Oh, every time there’s change, it’s going to dip. That’s not true. Sometimes you don’t, but when we did this time it’s kind of, OK, it’s part of the process. We have to learn how to go through it. They did.”

He shoved the credit off on Maurice, who has lost more games than any coach in NHL history and added 32 more in the regular season. The 56-year-old Canadian has also coached more games than all but three other coaches, though, and his lifetime of experiences in hockey prepared him for a situation like this.

He faced incessant questions about his team’s performance for six months, all the while insisting the club had the right idea. There were advanced metrics insisting the Panthers were better than the results suggested and there was no point in making the playoffs, Maurice even argued, if they would just flame out quickly again by playing the same run-and-gun style. He was seasoned enough to get a long leash from Zito and never waver from his convictions.

“Kudos to Paul for having a plan, sticking to the plan, really working the plan, teaching, helping, making guys better,” Zito said. “That coaching staff deserves so much credit. It’s unbelievable. They kept focus, they kept levity in the room and they celebrate what’s good about the players.”

The players’ celebrations are what Maurice enjoyed most about the win and Zito agreed, especially watching star defenseman Aaron Ekblad and Barkov — who have played in Florida for nine and 10 years, respectively — get to be part of a run like this.

“Honesty, it is,” Zito said. “They worked so hard.”

Near the end of the night, he thought back to his first meeting with owner Vincent Viola and his family, way back in 2020 after he took over as GM.

Back then, the franchise was lifeless, with only four postseason appearances his century.

“They said pretty much, You’ve got to wake up the franchise,” Zito recalled. “We need to change the culture across the board.”

In his first offseason, more than a third of the roster turned over. By his second, he had traded for three more core players and then he made his biggest moves yet in his third.

Each season has been better than the last, with three straight playoff performances and now their deepest run in a generation.

There are greater goals ahead, but there’s also already validation. The Panthers, they believe, are here to stay.

“[The goal] obviously is to design a group that can actually win the Cup and actually win it. A lot of teams can, but you need those pieces,” Zito said. “You need the supplemental pieces, the support pieces, the coaching staff, the team services guy. We’re doing a complete overhaul and then the part of it is having consistency for the fans in the playoffs. That’s why it was so important.