SIMMONS: Maurice no overnight sensation, but sensation nonetheless

National Post

16 hours ago

Bill Zito did a lot of asking around before he hired Paul Maurice to coach the Florida Panthers.
In fact, he decided to poll some of his former clients from the days when he was a player agent.
He chose three players intentionally to ask a simple question: Who is the best coach you ever played for?
One player was an NHL star. One player was an NHL also-ran. One player was mostly a minor-leaguer who had spent some time on NHL rosters. The three players were from different countries.
And they all came up with the same answer: Maurice.
'To hear different perspectives on the same thing was fascinating,' said Zito, the highly accomplished general manager of the soon to be back-to-back Stanley Cup champion Panthers. 'It made it a lot easier for me to see the big picture. The players I ask were what I'd call complete hockey geeks, so you don't know what you're going to get from them.
'But I listened to them. I asked a lot of questions. And I think we have the best coach in the business, I really believe that.'
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Before he coached a game with the Florida Panthers, Maurice was more known for longevity and a sharp sense of humour than he was for success as an NHL coach. He had coached for two years in Hartford, with Carolina twice, Toronto for two years, Winnipeg for nine: An extraordinarily long run without really getting a sniff of the Stanley Cup, although he did make the final once with the Hurricanes.
He has lost more NHL games than any other coach in history. He has also coached in more games than anyone not named Scotty Bowman in NHL history. But it wasn't until Zito's call, when Maurice wasn't sure where he was headed after parting ways with the Winnipeg Jets and didn't know if he wanted to coach any more.
Then the pieces all came together and the Panthers hired him three summers ago — and the coach once known for hanging around a long time and doing the best news conferences in the game suddenly became a legend.
'I think he was a great coach before he got here,' said Zito. 'He had a lot of success.'
But it's now three seasons with the Panthers, three trips to the Cup final, one win away from a second straight championship. How do you do better than that?
Only one current NHL coach has won as many as three Stanley Cups and that's Joel Quenneville, who was coach of the Panthers before the NHL and his part in the Chicago Blackhawks sexual assault scandal forced him out of Florida.
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Quenneville has three. Mike Sullivan and Jon Cooper have two. Maurice is about to join a rather exclusive club at a time when loyalists were hoping that Canada would return to a Stanley Cup celebration for the first time in 32 years.
The Panthers are about as Canadian as you can get at the highest level of the NHL. Maurice is from Sault Ste. Marie. His lead assistants, Jamie Kompon and Sylvain Lefebvre, are from Thunder Bay and Quebec.
The Conn Smythe favourites, Brad Marchand and Sam Bennett, are from Halifax and Holland Landing, just outside Toronto. Sam Reinhart is from Vancouver. Aaron Ekblad from Windsor. Evan Rodrigues and Carter Verhaeghe are from the Toronto area. Jonah Gadjovich is from Whitby, A.J. Greer is from Joliette, Que.
That's a lot of Canadian content for a team that has Roberto Luongo in management, as well as Bryan McCabe and Rick Dudley, all of them prominent Canadian hockey players or voices.
But the voices that matter most here belong to the general manager and the coach he hired. Zito says very little publicly. Maurice isn't paid by the word, although sometimes it seems that way.