Zito's rebuild as Panthers GM results in trip to Eastern Conference Final

When Bill Zito joined the Florida Panthers as their general manager on Sept. 2, 2020, he looked at the days and the weeks and the months that stretched out in front of him and saw a marathon ahead. He knew he had the right building blocks -- center Aleksander Barkov, goalie Sergei Bobrovsky, defenseman Aaron Ekblad -- but he also knew he needed so much more to find a finish line he could barely see at the time.

He, as he said then, was on mile 1.

The miles have fallen away under Zito's feet as the years have gone on, as he has added, piece by piece, player by player, contract by contract, to a team that has seen near-complete turnover in the three seasons since.

"How do I say this?" coach Paul Maurice said. "The spine it took to do what he did …"

Those three players, plus forward Eetu Luostarinen, who was playing for Charlotte of the American Hockey League, and goalie Spencer Knight, who was still at Boston College, are the only ones left who predate Zito. The coach has changed -- from Joel Quenneville to Andrew Brunette to Maurice -- and the team has been remade, through draft picks (forward Anton Lundell, No. 12 in the 2020 NHL Draft), through waiver claims (defenseman Gustav Forsling and Josh Mahura), through free agent signings (forwards Carter Verhaeghe, Anthony Duclair, Nick Cousins and Eric Staal, defensemen Radko Gudas and Marc Staal) and through trades (forwards Sam Reinhart and Sam Bennett, defenseman Brandon Montour).

And then there was the big one, the franchise-altering, NHL-shaking, Twitter-shattering trade that Zito pulled off on July 22, 2022, sending forward Jonathan Huberdeau, defenseman MacKenzie Weegar, forward prospect Cole Schwindt and a lottery-protected first-round pick in the 2025 NHL Draft to the Calgary Flames for the brash, goal-scoring, hard-nosed, get-under-the-skin forward Matthew Tkachuk and a conditional fourth-round pick in the 2025 draft.

Which is why it makes sense that, when Zito is asked for his vision when he was hired, he starts with, "Oh, boy."

Because the team that Zito has now, that is set to face the Carolina Hurricanes in the Eastern Conference Final starting Thursday at Carolina (8 p.m. ET; TNT, CBC, SN, TVAS), is not the one that he inherited.

It is the one that he built, finding value in players not everyone saw the value in. Who were traded by other teams. Who hadn't been given the opportunity or the time or the space to grow by other teams. Zito saw something, though. He identified that they might be able to help his team, set about acquiring them, and trusted that they'd make a difference.

"Sam Bennett. Carter Verhaeghe. Gustav Forsling," Maurice listed. "Like, incredible players."

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It wasn't just the players that Zito felt he needed to change. It was a holistic approach, a way of transforming a franchise that hadn't won a round in the Stanley Cup Playoffs since a stunning run to the Stanley Cup Final in 1996 in Florida's third season. Since Zito took over, the Panthers have improved every season, from a first-round exit in 2021 to a second-round exit in 2022 to a conference final appearance this season.

When he began, he set out to do two primary things: to change the culture, bringing in competitiveness, accountability and work ethic; and to ensure that players enjoyed being members of the Panthers.

"I want your family to be happy," Zito said. "I want when you're not here, given everything you have, that the rest of your world is nice and fun. Those are almost diametrically opposed in some instances, if you're irresponsible and immature. So, modifying the culture to winning and accountability.

"I thought then, if you change the culture and you get the talent and the culture exists, well then that's how you win. I mean, that's a pretty simple recipe. [Patric] Hornqvist was a huge part of that."

Twenty-two days after Zito was hired, he traded defenseman Mike Matheson and forward Colton Sceviour to the Pittsburgh Penguins for Hornqvist, a forward who had won the Stanley Cup twice (2016, 2017) with the Penguins, scoring the Cup-winning goal in Game 6 in 2017.

Hornqvist remains with the team, though he has been limited to 22 games this season after two concussions in the span of a month. He last played Dec. 3 and will not play the rest of this season. But he has still been instrumental in getting the team to this point.

From there, Zito built a staff that included Sunny Mehta, his vice president of hockey strategy and intelligence, a former professional poker player and early hockey analytics guru. And he set out to understand his players, to see what he had to work with, and what he needed.

"The first part for me was getting to know them as people, to find out the skill package, the physical package. The on-ice, the hockey sense, is only part of it. When you look at champions, they all have this part of it," Zito said, pointing to his chest. "Not only the warrior heart, but they're good people."

He looked for players that other players would want to play for. Not just with, but for.

That began with Barkov. As Zito said of the Florida captain, "It is impossible to overstate the character of 'Sasha.'"

From there, the Panthers began to build, signing Gudas, Verhaeghe and forward Ryan Lomberg on Oct. 9, 2020, and signing Duclair on Dec. 17 of that year. He picked up Forsling off waivers from Carolina on Jan. 9, 2021. Within two days in April of 2021, Zito acquired Montour in a trade with the Buffalo Sabres for a third-round pick in the 2021 NHL Draft, then acquired Bennett in a trade with the Calgary Flames with a sixth-round pick in the 2022 NHL Draft for a second-round pick and a prospect. Reinhart arrived in a trade with Buffalo on July 24, 2021, for top goalie prospect Devon Levi and a first-round pick in the 2022 draft.

And though Zito is, at times, coy about the success the Panthers have had in finding undervalued and underutilized players to fill out their roster -- guys like Bennett and Verhaeghe and Montour -- he talks openly about finding a way to combine making players both comfortable and motivated at the same time.

"I think his time as a player agent gives him a different perspective," Maurice said "His team is like 23 clients of his -- he takes care of them. But if you don't fit, you're going somewhere else. And he's got an eye for it."

But it was also born out of necessity, out of a tricky NHL salary cap situation that has been difficult to navigate, especially this season when it has at times forced Florida to play without a full roster. The Panthers are not trying to be smarter than anybody else. They just don't have the cash to throw around.

As Zito said, "We don't have a choice."

It's a thorough process, one that Zito said can get emotional at times, resulting in arguments that can get pretty darn heated "almost to the level of being unprofessional," he said. It was to the point that when an outsider once came to a pro scouting meeting, the person figured that two participants were brothers because, well, who else could argue like that while still maintaining that level of respect?

"I was proud of that," Zito said. "And motivated by it to make sure that everybody, their opinions matter. They might be wrong. But we want to get to the right decision."

It starts at the top, the idea that owner Vincent Viola imbued in his management, that there's no penalty for failure, so long as you do it the right way.

"Maybe part of our M.O. is we want to find the good in players and celebrate that," Zito said. "Which famously is what Paul does."

Which is why, when asked who brought it all together, Zito first said that the easy answer would be Tkachuk -- a finalist this season for the Hart Trophy, awarded to the NHL most valuable player -- but that he thinks it's more of a collective, pieces from all of the varied players and personalities that he has brought to South Florida.

He thought for another second.

"It might be 'Mo,'" he said.

And therein was another bold move that Zito made, opting not to hire Brunette full-time after the coach had led the Panthers for the remainder of the 2021-22 season following Quenneville's resignation Oct. 28, 2021. Brunette had helped the Panthers to the Presidents' Trophy, awarded to the team with the best record in the NHL.

But Zito decided to go in another direction. Maurice, for his part, was not actively looking for another head coaching job, having resigned after nine seasons as Winnipeg Jets coach Dec. 17, 2021, but was enticed by the possibilities that the team and that Zito himself offered.

"Paul has implemented, guided, invented -- I'm trying to think of some more descriptive adjectives -- nurtured, begged, pushed, pulled the group into understanding time and place," Zito said. "There's a time and place to be defensive-minded, to be conservative, to be risk-averse. There's a time and place to be aggressive, less mindful of risks that you take, trying to implement a new system into these guys. And a new way to think -- that you can be emotional and charged and be cerebral at the same time.

"I don't think a day has gone by in my interaction where he hasn't made a point of enjoying this."

The whole team is. You could ask Zito if he is, but general managers rarely get the chance to enjoy anything. Their heads are always on to the next, the next, the next, to figuring out how to solve the future, including the problems they'll create with their success. Because though once those players were undervalued, after blossoming with the Panthers, some of them will be merely valued, making them perhaps out of the team's reach in the future.

Zito's mind is on that problem while, at the same time, he looks at what is here, now. At the Eastern Conference Final, at the roster he assembled, at the success that is finally coming to a South Florida team that has been waiting for a long, long time.

So, where is he in that marathon? How far away is the finish line now?

"How close are we? I don't know," Zito said. "You tend to evaluate it every day. Certainly we've moved along the continuum. It would be convenient and self-serving to see only the good things and the success. You make your own luck -- it's still luck, some of it. So, where we are on the continuum, I won't know till the summertime. But I feel that we're along the way."