Maurice taking different approach to new job as Panthers coach
Back for 25th NHL season, 'I didn't want to do the same thing'
Because it has taken the new Florida Panthers coach that long to understand the game well enough.
Maurice, in his 25th season of coaching in the NHL, was handed the reins to the Hartford Whalers in 1995, at 28 years old with just two seasons of head coaching experience in the Ontario Hockey League. He was in over his head and he knew it.
"I think the puck can move about 16 different ways off a dumped puck, their breakout, your forecheck," Maurice said. "And I think I tried to cover them all in Hartford at one point in my career."
No longer.
"We're trying to get it down to one read," he said.
It's a new way of approaching the game that Maurice, who is 777-682-130 with 99 ties in 1,688 NHL games, is taking in his new gig. Six months after he resigned as coach of the Winnipeg Jets after nine seasons, believing that his voice was no longer the right one for the job, he agreed to take on the defending Presidents' Trophy-winning Panthers, with a new vision.
"I didn't want to run the same program. I didn't want to be the same coach," Maurice said. "I wasn't coming back if I didn't think I could add something specific and also learn."
So that's what he's trying to do.
The Panthers are 2-1-0 and will play the Philadelphia Flyers on Wednesday in their home opener at FLA Live Arena (7:30 p.m. ET; TNT, TVAS). They again are a favorite in the Eastern Conference with a chance to go deeper in the Stanley Cup Playoffs than last season, when they were swept by the Tampa Bay Lightning in the second round.
Maurice watched the Panthers last spring, watched when they rolled through the regular season, drawn to them only as a fan and not as a coach. This was the team he stopped on when he was flipping through the channels, the team that intrigued him from afar.
Which was why, when Panthers general manager Bill Zito called him during the offseason, the words escaped before Maurice knew what he was saying.
What are you interested in doing?
"I said, I'm interested in Florida," Maurice recalled. "It was kind of out of my mouth before I'd even let it process."
The men never had met before.
Maurice was hired June 22, part of an offseason that saw Florida trade forward Jonathan Huberdeau and defenseman MacKenzie Weegar for forward Matthew Tkachuk exactly one month later. Neither move seemed altogether likely back when Maurice was idly watching the Panthers, entertained by their brand of hockey and the possibilities it contained.
And yet here he is, tackling a new opportunity, the challenge of sharpening the Panthers from a very good team into a great one, into one that not only can contend for the Stanley Cup, but win it.
"You see his experience," captain Aleksander Barkov said. "He's coached a lot of teams, a lot of time in this league and overall [has] seen a lot of hockey. So, he knows exactly what's going on, every day how to get the guys going, how to wake them up if needed. Just his experience and the way he knows everything about the game is just another level."
And it starts with the details.
"Details is like the main thing that comes to mind," defenseman Aaron Ekblad said Monday before he was injured during a 5-3 loss at the Boston Bruins. "Just who he is as a person. Extremely detailed. His experience in the game has made it really cool to see his in-game adjustments and his adjustments as we see different teams. That's the most noticeable thing, I think.
"We're kind of evolving here as a team right now and trying to learn new systems. His ability to explain things and get us all on the same page is just incredible. Truly incredible."
At the same time, part of what Maurice wanted to do with the Panthers was let his players do what they do best. It was something he had learned during those 25 years, something he took to heart. A quote from Albert Einstein, that if you can't explain something simply, you don't truly understand it.
He knew that back when he started he probably couldn't explain the game simply. He, in fact, didn't understand it well enough.
But with 25 years of coaching experience, he just might now.
"Our No. 1 priority coming in as a staff is do not slow this team down," Maurice said. "But some structure has to come into the game. So, we spend an awful lot of time going, 'OK, that's seven reads, let's turn this into three reads.' And then, 'What's the one read that covers the biggest portion of the game?' And after that, 'Let's just let the players play.'
"So, we've been hard on details. But we work really, really hard on not having too many of them."
Maurice comes back again to how he started in the NHL, to a career in which he always has had to learn on the job while being tasked with leading a team. Back then, he was just trying to absorb as much as he could. He watched so much video -- he knew he had to -- and "I became almost a systems coach," he said.
He needed to prove himself. He had to be so detailed that people -- players, fans, owners -- believed he could do what he had been hired to do.
He knows better now, he thinks. The imposter syndrome has faded. He knows how important speed is, especially for the Panthers, and knows that he doesn't want to mess than up. He doesn't want to get in the way.
"You stop having to prove it," he said. "You value the individual talents of the players more. I don't want them hearing my voice every time they do it. I want them to play."
That's why he took this job. He believed he could do things differently, be different, take the Panthers to a place they haven't been before -- and himself with them.
"The only way I wanted to go back is if I felt I could be better than I was ever before," he said. "I didn't want to do the same thing. I didn't want to run the same program. I wanted to get somewhere where I could learn as much from them as maybe I could teach them. And I found it here."
