Florida Panthers centre Brad Marchand, right, celebrates his goal with teammate Eetu Luostarinen during the first period of Game 5 in Edmonton on Saturday.Darryl Dyck/The Canadian Press
At some point in every one of their playoff series over the last three years, the opponent gets to meet the Florida Panthers.
It’s never in Game 1. Usually, it’s 4 or 5. The Panthers have let you outpace them at points. Maybe they’ve even fallen behind. But around Game 5 is where they get eye-to-eye with you, and then begin to pull away.
On Friday night, after suffering a dispiriting comeback defeat in their own arena, the Panthers travelled to Edmonton and introduced themselves. It finished 6-2, but the score didn’t begin to express the level of the battering. If hockey coaches threw white towels, Kris Knoblauch might have considered it.
When teams around the league hint that they would like to copy Florida – mostly by flattering them to the skies without fully articulating what makes them special – this is what they’re talking about.
They don’t say what they like about them, because they don’t know how to express it. It’s not a formula. It’s something you know when you see, and you can’t see it until it’s happening in front of you.
There is a world in which Edmonton comes back and wins this series, though that world is getting harder to spot.
Should they lose, the question for them and every other team in the league is the same as last year – how do we become Florida?
Corey Perry’s wake-up call has Edmonton Oilers heading home on a high
This has nothing to do with talent. Are the Oilers/Avalanche/Stars/Jets/Leafs as talented as Florida? Probably. I suppose it depends on what you mean by talent.
Connor Hellebuyck just won the NHL’s won most valuable player award and the league’s best goalie award. He’s demonstrably more talented than anyone else. Right now, would you rather have him in net or 36-year-old Sergei Bobrovsky, who hasn’t won a Vezina in almost a decade? Do you even have to think about it?
To borrow the Breitbart-ism, talent is downstream from culture, though few teams act like it.
Florida’s Seth Jones, right, defends against Edmonton’s Leon Draisaitl during the third period of Game 5.Perry Nelson/Reuters
You don’t start with statistics. You start and finish with personalities. Then you go up a level and look at the person determining which personality is best. Simple, but few teams are willing to do it ruthlessly.
First principle – does your team have a good culture?
Every club says they do, and a lot of them get nowhere near the Stanley Cup. A good culture isn’t a fun culture or a supportive culture. This isn’t a kindergarten. If you’re not winning, your culture needs fixing.
What does culture change mean? It isn’t finding the oldest, orneriest or most expensive player you can find and slotting him into a mediocre operation, which continues to be mediocre.
It’s finding the players who don’t just want to win, but need to do so. There aren’t as many of them as sports people would lead you to believe.
PWHL expansion draft shakes up league rosters
Many professional athletes do not experience true competition until they reach the very highest level. They are the kid who cruised through every level of schooling without having to do homework.
Now they’re surrounded by people who are just as talented as they are, some of whom had to struggle to get there. Some of those naturals will get better. Some won’t. A few will be good enough, but won’t care all that much and will coast. Some will stick around for the money. Some can manage great life balance. Some are terrible at it.
All of them are physically gifted, perpetually coddled 20-something men, which means they have no sense of mortality. It’s not until you hit your 40s that most people begin to feel time slipping by them. A person who feels like the good times will last forever is not the sort of person who feels any urgency to win right now.
The real challenge isn’t finding the guy with the quickest shot release. It’s finding the guy who thinks this could all end tomorrow. Not just says that, but feels it. Florida appears to have more of those guys than any team in the NHL.
Why did they add Marchand and Seth Jones to the team at the deadline? Depth, obviously. But also to inject a little more desperation into the mix.
Three months ago, everyone thought Marchand was shot. That he would leave Boston for a few weeks, get refreshed somewhere else, then return to Massachusetts on a team-friendly deal to while away his golden years on a loser.
This proves once again that most of the NHL values the wrong things. They see numbers over people. They look at the scoreline and not at the man.
It’s why a new generation of hockey executives have come to love analytics. Because when they fail at doing their only job – spotting winners – they can turn around, point at the numbers and say, “It should have worked.”
Cathal Kelly: Wayne Gretzky is hiding in plain sight during the Stanley Cup final
In this environment, a great executive is far rarer than a great player. It’s someone who sees instinctively into men’s hearts and knows what motivates them. There is no flowchart to express this. There is only a result.
You want to be Florida? You don’t need Marchand, Sam Bennett or Aleksander Barkov, though that would be a great start. What you need is Panthers’ GM Bill Zito. He’s done this job for five years and is about to win his second Stanley Cup. Based on results, he is the most valuable employee in the NHL right now, more so than any one player.
Every team intending on culture change gets a choice.
You could start at the bottom, switching out this second-line winger for a different second-line winger.
You could start in the middle, trying to take the biggest free-agent names off the board.
Or you could start at the top, with the person who makes all those decisions.
If you start at the top, you can do what everybody else does – hire a guy who’s been in charge at four or five teams for 20-plus years, won one title, and missed the playoffs eight times. Maybe he played the game. I’ll guarantee you he looks and talks like he knows what he’s doing. That’s his standout attribute.
Or you could hire the guy who wins, or is consistently on his way to doing so, rather than the guy everyone knows from a TSN panel. If he isn’t providing demonstrable results inside two to three years, you move on. Don’t look for a hockey guy. Look for a winner.