No one feels bad for the Stanley Cup champs, but Florida Panthers general manager Bill Zito has had a crazy, short summer by any imaginable definition.
To recap: Won the Cup June 24, negotiated an 11th-hour mega contract for Sam Reinhart six days later while also attending Cup parade earlier that day, and well, the work has barely stopped ever since.
But complain? Are you kidding me?
“Pretty hectic,” Zito said with a chuckle this week.
To which the Panthers GM and president of hockey operations says the line of the summer belongs to Tampa Bay Lightning GM Julien BriseBois.
“He says, ‘How are you doing man?’” Zito recalled. “I said, ‘Dude, I’m in one. I’m chasing this, I’m doing that, I’m trying to organize this and that …’
“And he laughs and says, ‘Champagne problems, my friend. Champagne problems.’”
Exactly. And the two-time Cup champion GM of the Lightning would know.
The thing about it is Florida has had two short summers in a row after losing in the Cup Final to the Vegas Golden Knights the previous season. So in some respect, that should help the defending champs understand how to prepare for the 2024-25 season.
“Yeah, so you go through one year and you lose and you think you’re going to be tired, you’re not going to be good maybe, you’re going to be beat up,” Zito told The Athletic. “Except you weren’t. And then you go through it again and you win it.
“Then you say, ‘There’s going to be a little bit of a hangover, fatigue.’ But maybe there won’t be? Unless you try, you’ll never know, right?”
No Cup champion in the salary-cap era gets to come back with the same roster. Change is inevitable, and in this case, top-four blueliner Brandon Montour understandably chased his fortune to Seattle ($50 million over seven years) as an unrestricted free agent.
The champs also lost another key defenseman to free agency in Oliver Ekman-Larsson, plus forwards Vladimir Tarasenko, Ryan Lomberg and Kevin Stenlund, as well as backup goalie Anthony Stolarz.
Zito responded by adding the likes of blueliners Nate Schmidt and Adam Boqvist and forwards Tomáš Nosek, A.J. Greer and Jesper Boqvist.
The losses of Montour and OEL are particularly noteworthy, of course. Who fills those minutes on the blue line?
“It’s going to be by committee until someone becomes the head of the committee,” Zito said. “We began last year a little bit like that — how would we replace (Radko) Gudas and (Marc) Staal? And we think we have a number of different skill sets with some of the new guys and some of the guys that have been here.
“I think it probably gets distributed between and among the group, and we’ll see who rises.”
There were changes up front as well, particularly on the fourth line. And a bit of change is usually a good thing for a Cup champion. The new faces can bring hunger to help re-engage a group that’s already climbed the mountain.
“You never want to say goodbye to people in your community who you care about and who are part of that (championship) team, right?” Zito said. “Because it’s the team that has success. More than the collection of the pieces, it’s the team. Everyone knows that. So you never want to say goodbye.
“But, yeah, sometimes new guys come in and they fit seamlessly. We’ve heard many times: The team is bigger than any individual. It just is. So hopefully we can get the right people to come on and keep the train moving forward.”
The biggest UFA of all stayed put: Reinhart, he of the career-high 57 goals, re-upped. Which surprised no one. But man, it got interesting. Right down to the wire on June 30 late at night, with the midnight deadline of getting an eight-year max deal done. The average annual value was always going to start with an 8 if he stayed. It was probably going to start with a 10 if he left. Make it $8.625 million on average times eight years.
Never in doubt!
“I think it was more hectic for you folks (in the media),” Zito said. “Because we all had excellent communication. Between Craig Oster, the agent, Sam, coach (Paul Maurice), myself, ownership, everybody knew all along, ‘OK, here’s where we are. We want to keep Sam and we want to keep as many guys as we possibly can.’”
All of which will be tested again as far as keeping this championship core together.
Three key players are entering the final years of their contracts in Sam Bennett, Carter Verhaeghe and Aaron Ekblad. All three pending UFAs have different agents. There have been conversations throughout the summer with all three camps. The idea is to try and get all extended.
“Contract negotiations between and among individual players are unique and it seems that over time, they’re all a little bit different,” Zito said. “We will absolutely work with each player in the right time frame and the right manner for him with the hopes of keeping all the guys.
“And being mindful of what some people might perceive as time frames of what you have may not apply to somebody else. So we’ll pursue it individually in the appropriate manner and certainly those three guys are all guys we want to keep and are all guys with whom we have solid communication.”
This is just pointing out the obvious, but whatever number the Panthers end up with each player will be a hometown discount to some degree compared to what they could get on the open market. That’s a reflection of both wanting to keep a championship team together and also Florida’s advantageous state income tax situation. See Reinhart. See Gustav Forsling ($5.75 million AAV).
There’s a path to making it work with all three but no guarantee of it.
“We’re trying to get the pieces in the puzzle and keep all the pieces,” Zito said. “We have a plan that we think works. … A plan that gets everybody taken care of.
“But I’ve said this so many times and I think I can say it with some degree of credibility having worked on the other side (as an agent) for so long, you have to respect people’s thought processes and you have to respect their wishes. And because they don’t agree with you and because they decide they’re not prepared to do something, it doesn’t make them a bad guy or a bad teammate. It’s just how they feel, and they’ve earned it.”
Meanwhile, there’s Spencer Knight. The 23-year-old goalie returns to the NHL after working his way back from well-documented challenges off the ice and putting up a solid AHL season. With Stolarz gone, Knight is set up to back up veteran Sergei Bobrovsky and perhaps even push him.
“I’m really proud of him,” Zito said of Knight, drafted 13th in 2019. “I’m proud of the work that he put in. I’m proud of what he’s done personally and professionally to deal with the situation and put it behind him. He’s inspirational.
“I think Spencer Knight has a tremendous amount of hockey in front of him. He’s healthy. He tested great. Yeah, it’s really nice to have him back.”
We began our conversation with the funny line BriseBois delivered to his GM counterpart. It also made me think to ask Zito as we wrapped up about something BriseBois once told me about defending that 2020 Cup champion title, which the Bolts certainly did.
“From my conversations with various players leading up to training camp, to a man everyone seemed really hungry to chase another championship. It’s one thing to be a Stanley Cup winner. It’s another to be a two-time Stanley Cup winner,” BriseBois told me in March 2021, four months before his team won the Cup again.
Can the Panthers feed off that repeat motivation? Or are their bellies full?
“You get caught up in these cliches right? And you don’t want to talk about it,” Zito said. “Of course you have to say, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, we have the hunger.’ You can’t say, ‘Nah, we’re good.’ So the credibility of the words is tainted immediately, right?
“I can tell you personally my own feelings, they echo exactly what Julien remarked to you before. And I’ve heard it from a number of people who said: If you get one, it’s just the beginning of how hard you want to work to do it again. And appreciate how fleeting it can be. You can’t take the foot off the gas for a second.”
(Photo: Bruce Bennett / Getty Images)
