Dave Hyde: Paul Maurice found a fit and Panthers endured his new system to playoff success

SUNRISE — It’s the trees Paul Maurice will notice the most. Not his old home, which he doesn’t drive by, or even the high school across from the Carolina Hurricanes’ arena, where his sons went to school.

“It’s not nearly as nostalgic as you might think,’’ the Florida Panthers coach says of returning to the place he coached over two stints for the start of Thursday’s Eastern Conference finals.

The trees grew tall around the arena. That’s how Maurice measures time, and the arc of change in a good career, because he remembers them being planted when his Hartford Whalers moved to Raleigh in 1995.

He was 30 then, already an NHL coach for two years, and it was all in front of him: A run to the Stanley Cup Finals; the fastest NHL coach to 1,000 wins (at age 43); stops in Toronto and New York and then Russia; and a walleye fishing trip last summer on Lake of the Woods, bordering Ontario and Manitoba, when a phone call came from Panthers general manager Bill Zito.

“I wasn’t done,’’ he said of his coaching career. “But I was good.”

He had resigned as Winnipeg’s coach the previous December. He turned down two job offers because they weren’t a good fit — “It wasn’t them, it was me,’’ he said. He was 55. He knew fits by then.

He talked with Zito for an hour that day. He then flew to South Florida and talked with him for five hours. They then talked for 10 hours the following day.

“I guess it was a job interview,’’ Maurice said. “I wasn’t looking for a job, but I found an interesting place.”

Maurice had his next stop and Zito had a veteran coach to instill the envisioned philosophical change. The Panthers had the NHL’s best regular season in 2021-22, but they played too cute, too loose, too defensively undisciplined in a way that didn’t win in the playoffs.

Maurice exorcised the cute over the first five days of training camp.

“The hardest I’ve worked a team,’’ he called that stretch.

He delivered a line then in his opening speech to the team of, “developing the capacity to endure.” They worked on capturing that for months. Injuries and a road-heavy schedule into January didn’t help.

There was a game at Toronto in late March where Maurice laced into his team from behind the bench, questioning their fortitude, in a manner that went viral across Canada. The Panthers scored in the final minute and won in overtime.

If Maurice is that coach, he’s also one who revels in the light-hearted banter in this locker room.

“They’ve got jokes I don’t understand,’’ he said.

That’s part of the balance on a good team, he’s found.

“As much as the tone is, ‘Let’s work as hard as we possibly can,’ as the coach you have to open the door for them and (say), it’s OK to be in a good mood and laugh and enjoy if we’re as working as hard as we can,’’ he said.

The Boston playoff series was proof of the new Panthers, just as Zito and Maurice discussed over those long hours. There was no cute in that series, no room for any loose play or thinking.

“That was perfect for us,’’ Maurice said. “That was as hard a hitting series as I’ve seen and we found a way to endure … Every player won’t forget that series. It’ll become who we are.

“Everyone will know next training camp when we’re working and we don’t have to say, ‘Trust me, playoffs are hard.’ You knew it that series and when you got on the plane the next day (to Toronto) and had to do it again.”

Now they go to Carolina and try again. Maurice returns to a place he coached twice at, but it sounds nothing more than that to him. A place. A career dateline. That’s a coach’s life, in some form. He’s coming off a series against another stop of his in Toronto.

His former Carolina player, Rod Brind’Amour, is now the coach. His current player, Eric Staal, was Carolina’s captain and teammate of Brind’Amour there.

“There’s probably five or six really important people in my life who are in Raleigh, and I’ll get to see them, because they work for the team still,’’ Maurice said. “But the thing I notice is how big the trees are.”

They’ve grown. So, apparently, has he in other ways. And the team he leads has grown this season in a way that made these conference finals possible.