Panthers looked like a contender. To actually become one, they had to change everything

These are not the Florida Panthers that Paul Maurice fell in love with as he watched NHL games from his coach in his very brief — much briefer than he expected, certainly — foray into retirement last year.

Those Panthers were the highest-scoring team in a quarter of a century, regularly played Lou Bega’s “Mambo No. 5” at FLA Live Arena to celebrate their frequent five-goal performances and rode this explosive offense to the Presidents’ Trophy. They caught Maurice’s eye on the weeks and months after he abruptly resigned from the Winnipeg Jets, and gave him a reason to pick up the phone when Bill Zito called to ask him what he thought about hanging up his fishing rod and coming back to coaching in the offseason.

It was a bold move in an offseason full of them. Maurice loved the way Florida played, but he wouldn’t coach a team to play like that. The Panthers — put as bluntly as possible — had to play uglier and be more boring, both Zito and Maurice thought. They had to take a step backward to leap forward.

“I started with an idea,” the coach said Tuesday, “and we ended up getting to that idea.”

The idea was something like this: Florida might struggle a little bit more in the regular season, but it would pay off in the long run, in the form of a deeper run in the Stanley Cup playoffs, whether it was this year or in the years to come.

When exactly this all clicked is open to debate. There were signs, Maurice insists, around the time the calendar flipped to 2022 and certainly in January. There were the first handful of three-game winning streaks of the season later in the winter, and finally a six-game run in the spring to help the Panthers sneak into the 2023 Stanley Cup playoffs by a single point. After it lost three of four to start the Cup playoffs, Florida won seven of eight to set up an showdown with the Carolina Hurricanes in the Eastern Conference finals, starting Thursday at 8 p.m. at PNC Arena.

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Last year, the Panthers won more games and scored more goals than anyone else in the regular season, and then got swept out of the second round of the 2022 Stanley Cup playoffs. This year, they had the second most losses and fewest points of any playoff team, and made it to the NHL Conference Finals for the first time since the 1996 Stanley Cup playoffs, in only their third season of existence.

“To be honest,” Carter Verhaeghe admitted Tuesday. “I was more confident the year before headed into the playoffs.”

It didn’t mean they thought this was impossible, though.

“When we’re at our best, we can definitely be one of the best teams in the league,” the left wing added. “We were confident in that aspect.”

When he showed up in Florida last year and told the Panthers what he envisioned for them, Maurice did not find any pushback.

Everyone was shaken by the end of the way the 2021-22 NHL season ended. Florida got to the second round for the first time since 1996 and didn’t even win a single game when it got there. The rival Lightning smothered the Panthers on the way to a third straight appearance in the Stanley Cup Finals and Florida reexamined everything.

Zito replaced former interim coach Andrew Brunette, a finalist for the Jack Adams Award, with Maurice. He traded star left wing Jonathan Huberdeau — at the time, the leading scorer in franchise history — and star defenseman MacKenzie Weegar for superstar right wing Matthew Tkachuk.

Only three players left on the Panthers’ active roster were in South Florida before Zito took over as GM in 2020.

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Maurice, who has coached the fourth-most games in NHL history and lost the most, had to sell the Panthers — and, ultimately, all of South Florida — on this new vision.

As expected, it came with its challenges.

“It wasn’t difficult at all, in terms of their intent,” said Maurice, who was, coincidentally, the Hurricanes’ first coach. “I never had an argument with a player about the style of play, but it’s a challenge in terms of, this game happens so fast, you almost always will revert back to what you know.”

This attitude plagued the Panthers through the first half of the year. They were caught between two different identities — the high-powered, run-and-gun style of last season and their new, defensive-oriented attitude — and the result left them nine points out of a postseason spot after Christmas and fans across Florida understandably frustrated with their team’s regression.

The Panthers never wavered. They didn’t even make a trade — the only team in the NHL not to make a move ahead of the trade deadline this year — and believed they were on the right track.

They couldn’t have done anything different, Maurice argued.

“What you say in your opening speech at training camp has to be true the entire year, so you need to come with a plan and you need to be confident in that plan, and you need to stay with that plan,” the 56-year-old Canadian said. “You make adjustments, but you never come off the theme of what we were going to do.”

By the time the playoffs started last month, Florida found its new identity, blending the best of what it did last year with the principles Maurice emphasizes.

The Panthers do win with defense, but they don’t play slow. Florida has the second stingiest 5-on-5 defense left in the playoffs, but actually does it by generating the second most shots per game of teams in the Conference Finals.

The Panthers’ speed has allowed them to create more giveaways than anyone else in the final four and their skill let them turn those turnovers into nearly 30 scoring chances per 60 minutes.

A little more than 24 hours before Game 1, Maurice sat down at a podium in Raleigh, North Carolina, and mused about how he once sat there for a press conference “when I got fired” back in 2011.

“Is that an omen?” Zito asked him, laughing.

They both took a chance on the other about 10 months ago and it has them four wins away from the Stanley Cup Finals.