Florida Panthers GM Bill Zito Celebrates The Strengths Of The Players

In nine years with the Florida Panthers, team president and CEO Matt Caldwell has perfected the art of multi-tasking during home games.

“I guess I’ve developed a way to keep one eye on the game, or on a TV in a suite or the concourse while talking to someone,” he chuckled.

Caldwell’s routine didn’t change last Wednesday, when the Panthers made good on their chance to sweep the Carolina Hurricanes on home ice at FLA Live Arena. Matthew Tkachuk’s power-play goal with 4.9 seconds left in the third period gave the Panthers a 4-3 win and secured their second chance in franchise history to play for the Stanley Cup.

“I thought it was important, especially when you’re at home and it’s a clinching game, to be there with the fans,” Caldwell said. “That’s who we’re doing it for, so I tried to visit every fan section. We have a couple of clubs, a number of suites. I just tried to make a point of that. Our owners do it. I do it and I motivate and inspire our staff to do it. This is a client-service business.”

When Ryan Lomberg gave the Cats a 3-2 lead midway through the third period, it was time for Caldwell to stop moving.

“In the last 10 minutes of the game, I was able to sit down with one of our big sponsors,” he said. “Wonderful guy, and his wife. I was sitting with them in one of our bars — a suite that we turned into a bar. I watched the last 10 minutes. I watched Carolina tie it up, and then I watched the famous Tkachuk goal. Embraced him. It was just great.”

This year’s Panthers are an overnight success that has been 10 years in the making.

Looking only at the last few months, it appears that they caught lightning in a bottle — an eighth-seed that required a 6-1-1 run at the end of the regular season just to earn a ticket to the dance.

But the NHL’s 17^th-best team hasn’t just survived its playoff tests. The Panthers have thrived ever since they reversed a 3-1 deficit in Round 1, against the league-leading Boston Bruins.

After eliminating the Bruins in overtime of Game 7, Florida then took down the fourth-ranked Toronto Maple Leafs before sweeping the second-seeded Hurricanes. The Panthers are 11-1 in their last 12 playoff games and 6-0 in sudden death.

Florida’s presence in the playoffs may have been unexpected, but Bill Zito has been laying the groundwork for this run ever since he took over the general manager’s duties in September of 2020.

Last week, Zito became just the second person in NHL history to be named a finalist for the NHL’s general manager of the year award twice in his first three seasons with a team.

With a stagnant salary-cap ceiling since the 2020 pandemic pause, roster-building in the NHL is tougher than ever. And while the Panthers had only made the playoffs three times since 2000 and hadn’t won a round since 1996, Zito did start his tenure in Florida with a strong core group of players, including captain Aleksander Barkov at center, Aaron Ekblad on the blue line and two-time Vezina Trophy winner Sergei Bobrovsky in net.

Zito quickly went to work — trading for key pieces like forward Sam Reinhart, Sam Bennett and defenseman Brandon Montour all during his first year. He also augmented his lineup with under-the-radar waiver pickups like Gustav Forsling, now a 26-year-old top-pairing defenseman. Carter Verhaeghe, an early free-agent signing, has evolved into a 42-goal scorer during three seasons in Florida. He also scored the Game 7 overtime winner that eliminated the Bruins as one of his three game-winning goals in these playoffs.

Zito credits his time spent as a player agent for a unique perspective which helps him bring out the best in so many players.

“When you, for example, scout as an agent, it’s really easy,” he said. “You just see all the good things and you never really have to worry about the bad things.

“It does give you pause when you’re doing evaluations and you’re trying to, really, rebuild an entire organization. A memory. A hands-on experience that you’ve had, understood that it’s okay to celebrate the strengths of the players, what they do well.

“It’s everybody,” Zito emphasized. “It’s not just me. It’s Roberto (Luongo, special advisor to the general manager), the staff, the coaches. A couple of things. Have accountability — it’s not negotiable. Work ethic is not negotiable. But you should have fun. And we should celebrate the things that players do well, and let them be themselves.”

According to Caldwell, that’s only one element of what made Zito the preferred candidate when filling Florida’s general manager position.

“He has a real diverse background, in the sense of his experiences,” Caldwell said. “He had his own agency, so he understands the players’ side of things. He’d also already been in a front office with the Columbus Blue Jackets. He was there seven years as a No. 2, assistant GM. He got to learn under a great GM (Jarmo Kekalainen), so he had that experience. He went to Yale. He went to law school. He was a warrior.

“The modern-day GM has progressed so much,” Caldwell added. “Back in the old days, it was just about talent, evaluation and drafting, and picking the right players. That’s still a huge component of building out hockey ops, but we talked a lot about making this a destination franchise.

“That means it’s a place where people want to live, they want to build their families. They want to be in a community like South Florida and at the same time be part of a very first-class, top-tier hockey organization that has tradition and wins, that’s committed to winning the Stanley Cup.”

Zito is also quick to articulate his passion for the game.

“There’s this romantic part, particularly for someone like me who didn’t play in the NHL,” he said. “I used to have this discussion in Columbus with Nicky Foligno and I’d say, ‘You don’t love hockey more than me. You’re just better at it than I was.’”

The Panthers’ past woes have been well documented, but they’re shifting farther into the rearview mirror. The club’s current ownership group, led by Vinnie Viola, has spent the last decade building a strong foundation which should lead to a sustainable future — first, off the ice, with grassroots efforts to grow the game in South Florida and build a loyal, committed fanbase.

During its Presidents’ Trophy-winning season in 2021-22, The club also set all-time records in ticketing and sponsorship revenue. That set the foundation for Tkachuk’s seismic debut season in a Panthers uniform.

Last summer, with one year remaining before unrestricted free agency, the 24-year-old decided he wanted to leave the Calgary Flames and play out the next phase of his career in a different market — one which offered a pleasant lifestyle and a roster with enough talent to compete for a championship.

Florida fit those criteria, giving the Panthers a crack at acquiring a hockey unicorn whose abrasive physicality and dynamic personality are just as important to his makeup as his soft hands, sharp skating and uncanny clutch timing.

Zito was bold enough to swing for the fences. He offered up 115-point man Jonathan Huberdeau, top-pairing defenseman MacKenzie Weegar and a first-round draft pick as his primary trade bait and immediately committed to an eight-year, $76-million contract extension for Tkachuk.

After one year, that acquisition is shaping up to be one of the NHL’s greatest trades of all time. It’s also serving as a possible template for rival GMs who are looking to improve their own rosters this summer.

Tkachuk followed up his 104-point season in his final year with the Flames with a 109-point effort in his Panthers debut, more than 30 points above any teammate. Six of his 40 goals were game-winners, including three during the late winning streak that propelled them into the playoffs. And Tkachuk didn’t lose his edge. His 123 penalty minutes were also a career high and tied him for fourth-most in the league. He was just three minutes behind the player who most closely resembles him, his younger brother and the Ottawa Senators captain, Brady.

The Panthers also served as hosts for the 2023 NHL All-Star Game — a relaxed, sun-drenched affair that saw the home Atlantic Division team triumph in the 3-on-tournament. Playing alongside his brother, Matthew was named MVP on a weekend where the goal was to have fun, and to win.

A familiar theme. Foreshadowing?

While wins were initially difficult for the Panthers to procure this season, the positive revenue trends remained. Regular-season ticketing was up by 25% and sponsorship revenue by 35%, according to the team.

In the playoffs, Tkachuk has continued to deliver. Second in postseason scoring with 21 points in 16 games and with four game-winning goals including three in the conference final against Carolina, he is running neck-and-neck with Bobrovsky as a favorite for playoff MVP.

A month before he acquired Tkachuk last summer, Zito also hired Paul Maurice as the team’s new head coach. The move came as a surprise, since incumbent Andrew Brunette had been a finalist for the Jack Adams Award as coach of the year after guiding the Panthers to their first-ever Presidents’ Trophy and their first playoff-round win since 1996.

With Maurice available, Zito saw room for incremental improvement.

“If you have occasion to interact with Paul, you understand he’s a teacher,” Zito said. “He’s a motivator. He’s a friend. He’s a drill sergeant. He’s a confidant. He’s a carnival barker. He’s all these things at once.

“Paul Maurice was a fit for our group, for what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to grow to be better and to win.”

Now 56, Maurice coached his first NHL game in 1995, when the Panthers franchise was in just its third year of operation. He’s fourth all-time in games coached (1,767) and sixth in wins (817), but has never won a Stanley Cup.

In two weeks or so, either the Panthers or the Vegas Golden Knights will become a first-time Cup winner. Vegas had the better regular-season record, finishing first in the Western Conference and 19 points ahead of Florida. But throughout the postseason, the Panthers have delivered moments that suggest they’re becoming a true NHL force.

“We knew we had a better team than the record was on January 1,” Caldwell said. “We had a lot of faith and conviction. We studied the data and the analytics, how well we were playing. We had some injuries.

“So there was no panic. There was definitely scrutiny on why we had a drop-off at the beginning of the season, but we dug in and stuck with the plan. Coming out of the all-star game, you could feel the progress. It was just a matter of, ‘Hopefully, we don’t run out of time.’

“We got in and then we played very powerfully against, statistically, the best regular-season team in the history of the NHL. We split the first two games in Boston — that gave us some confidence. Then we lost two at home, 3-1 down and our backs against the wall.

“We won game five. Guys kept battling. Came home and we had a great game six at home. And then to go into Boston and win a game seven against a team like that. That night, I said to myself, ‘Wow. We’ve really arrived, to take them down.’”

Regardless of what happens over the next two weeks, the Panthers will continue their efforts to establish themselves as a destination franchise. That means even more fan outreach, more youth programs and, this fall, the opening of a new state-of-the-art practice facility in downtown Fort Lauderdale which will house two sheets of ice and, eventually, also a mid-sized concert venue.

The club would like nothing better than to display its first Stanley Cup at that ribbon-cutting ceremony.

The Stanley Cup Final between the Panthers and the Vegas Golden Knights begins Saturday at T-Mobile Arena on the Vegas Strip (8 p.m. ET, TNT, TBS, CBC, Sportsnet). The Panthers will host Game 3 (June 8), Game 4 (June 10) and Game 6 if necessary (June 16) at FLA Live Arena in Sunrise, Fla.