Should Panthers' cowboy GM win exec of the year?
Bill Zito changed the complexion of a team that finished first overall in the NHL in 2021-22, then watched as it struggled through the regular season before catching fire in the playoffs
For some bizarre reason, the Florida Panthers blast Tarzan Boy in their dressing room after wins. And no, it’s not their version of Gloria and there’s no amazing backstory, unfortunately. According to their media relations person, they play it just because they think it’s a good song. Which it is.
So it was after the Panthers finished off the Toronto Maple Leafs with a 3-2 overtime win in Game 5 of their second-round series to continue their incredible post-season run. If the Pittsburgh Penguins hadn’t lost to the lowly Chicago Blackhawks in Game 81 of the regular season, the Panthers would have been out of the playoffs entirely. If Sergei Bobrovsky had not stopped Brad Marchand on a breakaway with two seconds remaining in regulation time of Game 5 of the first round, the Panthers would have been a 2023 playoff footnote. But suddenly they found themselves in the Eastern Conference final, having knocked out the best and fourth-best teams in the NHL’s regular season in the first two rounds, with the second-best team in the NHL on the docket as the opponent in Round 3.
Standing quietly in the back corner of the dressing room was Panthers’ GM Bill Zito with his three-day shadow and newsboy hat. Give the guy a half-smoked cigar and he could pass as a 1930s gangster, if gangsters were educated at Yale University, then went on to law school. The architect of all of this, Zito was smiling because he was genuinely happy for the people around him, and probably a little because his team came out the other side after a period in which things looked really grim.
“I’m not going to offend the country of Ireland and call them ‘the troubles,’ but we had our tough times,” Zito said. “But there was one point when Paul (Panthers coach Maurice) said, ‘Everything we’re doing now is helping us get better.’ We had to go through it.”
A panel of all 32 GMs, along with five league executives and five members of the media, will vote on the Jim Gregory Award, which goes to the GM of the year, at some point after tonight’s Game 7 between Dallas and Seattle. It will be interesting to see which three of them are finalists for the award. Zito could very well be among them for putting together a Panthers team that picked precisely the right time of the season to get hot. Zito assembled a group that won the Presidents’ Trophy last season, then was swept in the second round of the playoffs by the Tampa Bay Lightning, and Zito wasn’t a finalist. So perhaps he deserves to be one in a season in which his team did the opposite.
Zito is what I like to call a cowboy when it comes to being a GM. David Poile is a cowboy. Julien BriseBois is a cowboy. Don Waddell is a cowboy. Jim Rutherford is a cowboy. These are guys who are decisive and bold in the moves they make and are not hesitant about swinging for the fences, even when they’ve had their moves blow up in their faces. They are undeterred by the prospect of making a disastrous move, plowing ahead with the kinds of trades that make the off-ice product entertaining and interesting.
Zito undoubtedly did that prior to this season. Despite being burned after making a series of stunning moves at the 2022 trade deadline that resulted in a second-round ouster, Zito was as active and bold in the off-season as he has ever been. He promptly fired the coach who had led his team to No. 1 overall in the NHL standings and replaced him with Maurice, a veteran career coach who is No. 7 on the NHL’s all-time wins list and No. 1 on the all-time losses list and still looking for his first Stanley Cup. He traded the guy who led the league in assists, plus one of his top defenceman, for Matthew Tkachuk. Jonathan Huberdeau and Mackenzie Weegar missed the playoffs with the Calgary Flames in 2022-23, but Weegar’s on a heater at the World Championship. Tkachuk, meanwhile, dragged the Panthers into the playoffs and through the first-round upset of one of the best regular-season teams in NHL history.
“He pulled the compete out of these guys,” Zito said of Maurice. But he could have just as easily said it about Tkachuk. Meanwhile, this is very much Zito’s team. Since he took over in September of 2020, he has traded for Tkachuk, Sam Reinhart, Brandon Montour and Sam Bennett. He’s signed Radko Gudas, Nick Cousins and Carter Verhaeghe. He even signed goalie Alex Lyon, who saved the Panthers season when Bobrovsky was lost and Spencer Knight entered the NHL/NHLPA player assistance program. He claimed Gustav Forsling off waivers. All of them were instrumental in this playoff run. But like all good cowboys, Zito knows when to keep his gun in his holster. After all of his changes and a season in which his team was without key players for long stretches, Zito stayed the course through all the turmoil and the losses and kept faith in his group. He listened at the trade deadline when his team was four points out of a playoff spot, but resisted the temptation to be a seller.
If anyone had said prior to the season that the Panthers would be in the Eastern Conference final, that would have tracked. If anyone had predicted prior to the season that they would have taken the route they did to get there, well, that was a little surprising. But sometimes you have to take the road less travelled, the one with all the potholes and bumps, to get to where you want to be. “I wonder if how we got there,” Zito said, “is what got us there. When your backs are up against the wall, you learn a lot about yourself. I wonder if that’s not part of it.”