During Hurricanes’ early days ‘in disarray,’ Paul Maurice shepherded team to security

The three men behind the Carolina Hurricanes’ bench, Rod Brind’Amour, Jeff Daniels and Tim Gleason, all played in different, overlapping eras for the Hurricanes.

They all had one coach in common.

Paul Maurice coached Brind’Amour and Daniels in his first stint here, and Gleason in his second, and it’s hard to imagine many coaches can say the same of their playoff opponents.

Twelve years have passed since Maurice was fired here, not for the first time, and so much has changed. The owner. The longtime general manager. A decade-long playoff drought came and went. Eric Staal left, and Sebastian Aho arrived, and Brind’Amour went from assistant coach to head coach.

Maurice, meanwhile, coached the Toronto Maple Leafs between his two tenures and 381 wins with the Hurricanes, went to Russia after his second and spent nine seasons with the Winnipeg Jets before walking away last winter, only to resurface this season with the Florida Panthers — a team of which big things was expected in the regular season that has finally delivered in the playoffs.

Just about everything comes full circle if you wait long enough, and now the coach who brought Brind’Amour into coaching has taken a fourth team to the conference finals, and for the first time the Hurricanes stand in his way.

“I just remember watching him do it, saying I’ll never be a coach,” Brind’Amour said this week. ”He’s up here, the way he thinks. I was like, oh man, if it has to be like that, I’m probably not going to be able to do it. Obviously, I found a different way to kind of do it.”

That cerebral side of Maurice often goes overlooked, his deep understanding of the game buried under the quips for the media, the f-bombs for officials. But even without having ever played in the league, he always found a way to get the most out his players, whether they were grizzled veterans (in 2002, when the Hurricanes could afford character but not talent) or the last proud remnants of a championship team (in 2009).

It’s almost impossible now to fathom the difficulty of the task Maurice faced when the Hartford Whalers moved to Raleigh in 1997, their 30-year-old head coach being asked to shepherd the team through two interim years in Greensboro with a minuscule payroll before trying to put down hockey roots in a basketball market.

Somehow, he and the Hurricanes both made it to the other side.

“It also seems quite removed to me,” Maurice told reporters in Florida on Monday. “It’s been a decade.”

Deep ties to Carolina

There are so many familiar ex-Hurricanes playing key roles for the Panthers in this playoff series: Eric Staal, Zac Dalpe, Gustav Forsling, Tuomo Ruutu, Eetu Luostarinen — and, in the front office, Paul Krepelka, the assistant general manager who helped build the Hurricanes into a playoff team before moving to Florida and doing the same for the Panthers, and whose fingerprints are on the roster in a way Ron Francis’ are not, no matter what you might hear on national TV.

But even Staal’s ties to the Hurricanes don’t run as deep as Maurice’s, even if both will inevitably someday join Brind’Amour, Francis, Glen Wesley and Cam Ward in the Hurricanes Hall of Fame.

From the moment Maurice sat in the back of a press conference discussing the possibility of the team moving to Raleigh paging through a Triangle real-estate guide, the 30-year-old head coach of the soon-to-be-no-longer Hartford Whalers, his existence, his future, was inseparable from the Hurricanes’ early days here.

“The franchise in Hartford-slash-Carolina was in, I would say, disarray,” Maurice said earlier this postseason, and it’s hard to argue the point.

He was the one told by a linesman to quit swearing in the Greensboro Coliseum, because kids could hear him in the empty arena. He was the one who maneuvered a moderately talented but extremely disciplined team to within three wins of the Stanley Cup, losing only to a roster overflowing with Hall of Famers. He was the target of a banner reading “Mo Must Go” that PNC Arena security removed from the 300 level in November 2003, putting in print a popular chant among the disgruntled.

He was finally fired many years after he was supposed to be — perennially in those early years, he was the top name on every pundit’s “first coach to be fired” lists, and never was — then made a triumphant return by guiding the Hurricanes back to the playoffs and to a long postseason run in 2009, before getting fired again.

Still, Maurice was around for all of the franchise’s early moments in North Carolina and some of its more important later ones, if not the most important of all. His first departure opened the door for Peter Laviolette, who in his first full season guided the Hurricanes to the Stanley Cup in 2006. When Laviolette faltered in the fall of 2008, Maurice stepped back in.

“I helped get him fired, because I was part of the team that got him fired, and part of getting him hired, the second time around,” Brind’Amour said. “He’s got a long history here, but he doesn’t care about that, and I don’t either.”

‘Always willing’

Maurice was a polarizing figure at times, a lightning rod for frustration with a franchise that couldn’t spend like other teams in the pre-cap era, but he also deserves tremendous credit for getting the most out of the roster in 2002, switching goalies on the fly and taking on Scotty Bowman head-to-head. That improbable run cemented the franchise’s future here, removing doubt from what had been a tenuous existence to that point.

Someone had to get the Hurricanes through the two years in Greensboro, to build some kind of momentum on the ice, to find some kind of postseason success. It just happened to be a coach who was, at the time, younger than a number of his players.

“The thing about Paul, with the maturity he had, he accepted whatever the situation was,” former Hurricanes general manager Jim Rutherford said. “We had very challenging situations in the early years in Raleigh and Paul never complained about it. He was always willing to take on the challenge.”

Maurice was also more closely linked to his general manager (Rutherford) and owner (Peter Karmanos) than most coaches ever are. His playing career ended with an eye injury in junior hockey, playing for Karmanos’ team. Karmanos and Rutherford brought him along, from junior coach to NHL assistant to precocious head coach, all of which made Maurice an easy target for fans dissatisfied with the team’s overall direction.

When you start that young, it leaves a lot of runway. He won his 1,000th game when he was 43, before many coaches blow their first whistle. Only Bowman, Barry Trotz and Joel Quenneville have coached more games in the NHL; Maurice has won more games than peers like Peter Laviolette, Mike Babcock and the late Pat Quinn. His spotless Game 7 record includes two wins with the Hurricanes.

The first time he came back to Raleigh as an opposing coach, in December 2006 with the Leafs, he noticed something few others would: The trees around PNC Arena had grown up and filled in, blocking the view from the team bus. He mentioned the trees again this week, now an additional 16 years older and bigger, as he comes back for the first time as a playoff opponent, this fragile sapling of a franchise he once nurtured having become a mighty oak in these many years without him.

“It’s not nearly as nostalgic as you might think,” Maurice said. “All three of my kids were born there. But I’m not driving past the house.”

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