New Panthers coach Paul Maurice promises a (slightly) different approach in Cup quest

Paul Maurice, only 55 despite his 24 years of experience as an NHL coach, knew he probably was not done, even when he resigned as coach of the Winnipeg Jets after just 28 games — with a winning record, no less — earlier this season. It took a night of flipping around through random hockey games in mid-January to plant the seed of his new Broward County home into his mind.

Exactly which game it was didn’t really matter — the Florida Panthers, after all, did score at least five goals nine times in the month. Maurice made the obvious observation pretty much everyone else did as they watched the Panthers storm to their first Presidents’ Trophy as the league’s highest scoring team in more than 25 years.

“That’s a good team. That’s an exciting team,” he told his wife, Michelle Maurice.

It was the team to lure him to the NHL after only six months away.

On Wednesday, Florida announced Maurice as the 18th coach in franchise history, replacing interim coach Andrew Brunette. On Thursday, the Panthers introduced their new coach with a press conference at FLA Live Arena in Sunrise, laying out their vision — and letting him explain his — to finally put together some sort of meaningful success in the Stanley Cup playoffs.

Panthers hire veteran Paul Maurice to replace Adams-finalist Andrew Brunette as coach

There are reasons Maurice is a natural fit for a team with very real Stanley Cup aspirations: He has coached the fourth most games in NHL history — now the most among active coaches — and won the seventh most; in more than two decades in the league, Maurice has seen just about everything.

There are also reasons the hire is strange: Maurice also has the most regulation losses of any coach in NHL history, has missed the Cup playoffs far more often than he has made them, has only been to the Stanley Cup Final once and the NHL Conference Finals twice, and never won a championship.

The hire of Maurice means Florida either passed up on — or was passed on — by other possible coaching candidates like Cup-winners Barry Trotz and John Tortorella, and Bruce Cassidy, who has the fourth best career points percentage for a coach with at least 500 games on his resume.

The Panthers also passed up on giving Brunette the full-time job, even after he was a finalist for the Jack Adams Award for guiding stabilizing Florida when former coach Joel Quenneville resigned after just seven games because of new revelations about his involvement in the Chicago Blackhawks’ mishandling of a 2010 sexual-assault allegation.

General manager Bill Zito said “experience is paramount,” considering the stage the Panthers are in, and Maurice has as much of it as almost anyone. Even though his .580 points percentage is relatively pedestrian and he hasn’t been a part of a dynastic run like Florida is hoping will soon come, Maurice believes his long life in the NHL has prepared him.

“A perspective from the outside sometimes helps,” he said, “somebody who has got maybe a bit of a historical perspective of the league, and has seen teams similar to this and the situation that they’re at.”

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The situation right now is complicated. By all measures, this year was one of the two best in franchise history. It was the Panthers’ best regular season ever and their second deepest postseason run, behind only their trip to the 1996 Stanley Cup Final in their third season of existence, and the core is young and mostly under team control through at least next season.

Florida is almost certain to be very good next year — any team with stars like Aaron Ekblad, Jonathan Huberdeau, Aleksander Barkov, Spencer Knight, MacKenzie Weegar and Sergei Bobrovsky should be — and going from good in the regular season to good in the playoffs usually takes time. The Panthers’ dilemma, then, was figuring out if they just needed to trust steady improvement and added experience would help them win in their current style, or if someone needed to come in from the outside and change some strategies.

Maurice’s promise sits somewhere in the middle. His focus on offense, he said, will probably be “secondary” because, “Why would you pull back a team offensively that has that kind of talent?” The defense, he said, will have “a slightly different structure.”

The grander changes he sees are philosophical and more about a collective mindset. Florida’s second-round offensive meltdown — a 4-0 series loss to the Tampa Bay Lightning, with three total goals scored — sticks with him because it was such a drastic shift from what he saw watching in January.

“The focus [is] five moving together distinctly and very, very quickly repeatedly — things that we can replicate,” Maurice said. “You can’t always hit that same pass through nine people over a stick. Now, they’ve done it because we’ve seen them do it and it’s pretty darn cool when it happens, but that can’t be your game plan in the playoffs. The playoff game changes completely. It’s a different style. The rush disappears. The net front becomes where all the battles are. So we have to add that to our game, so that when we get to that we have experience with it.

“Just think of 2009: The Pittsburgh Penguins win the Stanley Cup and they are a dominant force ... and yet nothing happens for a number of years. It’s very, very difficult to blast through the playoffs if you just think you play your game.”

In all, the Panthers interviewed seven different candidates for the job and Zito was adamant this was not about what Brunette lacks — the former assistant coach, who also previously worked in the Minnesota Wild’s front office, has a standing offer to stay with the organization — but rather what Maurice can bring.

A run to the Eastern Conference finals — or at least winning some games in Round 2 for the first time since the 1996 Stanley Cup playoffs — will be a must, sooner rather than later. Anything less than a title at some point will be a disappointment and not just for Florida.

Maurice has coached more games than anyone else without winning a Cup. The Panthers have played the sixth most without winning a championship.

“I’m looking to get to the next level, too. I’m looking for that final push, too,” Maurice said.

If players can learn from losses, then so can coaches, and Maurice has scratched and clawed in the same ways Florida will have to in order to reach the ultimate goal.”

“It was overwhelming that this was the man to be the real fit,” Zito said, “to take us into the challenges that are ahead.”