FORT LAUDERDALE — They won’t win a game or score a meaningful goal, but the next four days will say as much about the Florida Panthers as the next four months. These early practices on the ice offer a prism into the soul of the two-time champs like any playoff games did their heart and talent.
Because if you thought they’d ease into this next season, if you considered they’d cut back on work after playing more hockey than anyone the past three years, you don’t really know them after all this time.
“This will be the hardest camp they go through,’’ Panthers coach Paul Maurice said. “And they will be the reason why.”
This is the real residue of the past few seasons: A team with nothing left to win knows how to keep winning. Or so they say. The full team hits the ice Thursday offering the greatest asset, a work ethic that fits hand-in-glove with their hockey talent.
“The difference between our camp and the camps that I’ve run in the he past is the players make it hard,’’ Maurice said. “I know that because we’ve run the exact same drills in the exact same duration for three straight years.
“You can measure their output. It’s higher. It’s not me yelling at them, I’m barely yelling. You know at the end and you’re barking at them to keep their intensity up? I barely do that anymore. They just go as hard as they can. …
“They find a way to work harder. That’s when the players are driving the bus. They all know they’ve got to go through it. They push each other through it. So, our camp has gotten harder each year.”
This is a measure of this team, but it isn’t necessary to win in the new sports era. Or so we’re told. The Miami Dolphins congratulated each other this summer for running wind sprints or putting in extra work after some practices for the first time in years.
The Miami Heat once carried Pat Riley’s slogan as the “hardest-working, best-conditioned, most-unselfish, toughest, meanest, nastiest team in the NBA.” But you can’t say that when, like the rest of the league, you go weeks between practices during the season and your now-departed star, Jimmy Butler, had to be convinced for years to play regular-season games.
Panthers players will take odd days this season. That’s to be expected when you’ve played nearly an extra regular season (over the past three playoffs: 68 games). But that will be folded into the championship-or-bust expectations that are part of their culture by now — just like these four days have been since Maurice arrived in 2022.
“When you come in as a new coach, one of the first things you have to get rid of is the strata of your room — room stratification, that one player would being treated differently,’’ he said. “The expectation of outcome of the (Alexander) Barkov are different than the expectation of (a fourth-line player).
“You pay one player $10 million and another $775,00, there’s a reason for that. But there has to be common ground on what all men do. So we go really hard. We’ll go back and run the exact same practices, the exact same for three years. Four days. No fun.
“I’ve seen these guys work so hard, I don’t love doing it to them. But you get to that point where you think, ‘Well, we don’t have to do it anymore, right?’ Because they’ve already proven that they can.”
His voice went stern here.
“We’re not doing that,’’ he said. “We’re going as hard as we’ve ever gone.”
Camaraderie is a byproduct of such work, Maurice said. So is fun, veteran Brad Marchand said.
“You can have fun in the room when you know you’ve put in the work,” he said.
Maurice, to be sure, sponsored tough training camps for 22 years as a head coach before coming to the Panthers. He didn’t win a title all that time. The difference in those other teams is, “if you didn’t flat-out pay as hard as you could, you weren’t winning,’’ he said.
This team has the talent and make-up to go with it. They trained the past week off the ice in a change from past years. Now everyone is going on it.
Riley said after winning one title how the selfish, “Disease of Me,” can contaminates a team. Jimmy Johnson said after winning with the Dallas Cowboys it was difficult to keep everyone — players, assistant coaches, everyone — to work as hard.
We’ll see how the Panthers navigate having won two Cups. They hit ice Thursday. Four days. All work. No fun. Just how they’ve done it before.
