‘Those guys did it’: To explain Panthers’ success, Bill Zito looks to those around him
It’s easy to point to Bill Zito as the architect to the Florida Panthers’ success during the past few years.
After all, he is the president of hockey operations and general manager, the ultimate decision maker, the one who has brought this franchise out from the ashes of mediocrity into a stable force at the top of the NHL.
It’s even easier for Zito to point to the army he has surrounded himself with to create that success.
There are his three assistant general managers in Gregory Campbell, Sunny Mehta and Brett Peterson, who each oversees a different department inside hockey operations.
There’s the goaltending excellence department, fronted by Roberto Luongo with help from his brother Leo, goaltending consultant Francois Allaire and Panthers goalie coach Robb Tallas.
There’s the trust forged in Paul Maurice and his coaching staff.
And, of course, there’s the buy-in and execution from the players, who at the end of the day are the ones who drive how far the team will go.
“It’s funny,” Zito said in an interview with the Miami Herald on Monday, “because you have the title GM on your office door and all of a sudden people are calling you saying ‘Oh yeah, you did this.’ No. Those guys did it.”
And the work is never done.
While the Panthers’ recent run — two consecutive trips to the Stanley Cup Final, the franchise’s first championship last season and a chance to get back there again this season with Florida beginning its seven-game series with the Carolina Hurricanes in the Eastern Conference final on Tuesday — is well documented, nothing has been perfected. That’s not the way Zito or the Panthers operate.
There’s always something to tweak, to adjust, to improve.
“I look at it differently and think ‘Where are my shortcomings? What can I be doing better?’” Zito said. “And there’s a lot. One of the luxuries and then one of the curses of having that much talent is being aware of my need to be better and to try to be a better leader and better person, get people more opportunity. It’s balancing in the same way that Paul balances his team. I’ve got a pretty good example to follow in Paul. It’s humbling, and it makes you — at least me — it makes me try to be better. I don’t always do it, but I’ll try. And I don’t think anybody in there goes ‘Wow.’ Everybody just is who they are. We’re just blessed with a lot of talented people who are good people.”
‘If you build it, they will come’
Zito, of course, played a heavy hand in bringing a lot of those talented people to the Panthers.
Just look at the roster.
Only four players — captain and top-line center Aleksander Barkov, top-pairing defenseman Aaron Ekblad, goaltender Sergei Bobrovsky and winger Eetu Luostarinen — predate Zito.
He has built the core one by one. While Matthew Tkachuk was the big-name acquisition of his tenure, Zito has excelled in acquiring players who maybe were at a crossroads in their career and saw their production soar once they got to Florida. The likes of Carter Verhaeghe, Sam Bennett, Sam Reinhart and Gustav Forsling fit that category.
There are the annual offseason signings to replenish the roster and round out the team. This year, that came in the form of forward A.J. Greer, Tomas Nosek and Jesper Boqvist plus defenseman Nate Schmidt.
And then if the options are right, he’ll strike at the trade deadline to put the final pieces in place for a playoff run. Last year, it was forward Vladimir Tarasenko. This year, it was defenseman Seth Jones and forward Brad Marchand.
“If you build it, they will come,” Ekblad said. “We have built it, and people want to be here. Billy’s identifying diamonds in the rough and guys that are undervalued on different teams. ... His mindset is obviously to win, and our mindset as a team is to win. It’s a great situation.”
Zito said the process to filling out the roster each year is comparable to finding ways to “fit pieces into the puzzle.”
“It’s not always the most expensive or least expensive,” Zito said. “It’s the best fit for that part. Our guys have done a fantastic job of identifying people who would be a fit, and also at a price point we think we can get them in. Players have made sacrifices, too. You look across our roster, and the commitment from our guys has been to stay and be part of it. We’ve been blessed with that.”
The team behind Zito
And as Zito said, it’s not just him making the decisions.
He relies on everyone in his front office to make an informed decision, gleaning from each person’s individual expertise to figure out the right course of action.
He looks to Mehta and his four-person analytics team for data-driven decisions.
“They’re elite,” Zito said. “They know they’re elite. They’re cool with people disagreeing with them, with challenging them. They’re used to it. They don’t get offended if they come up with a statistics-based concept and somebody’s like ‘Come on?’ They don’t get defensive. They explain it.”
He looks to Campbell for everything related to the pro scouting department. And it doesn’t take much to know when he group feels confident about a particular player.
“He works tirelessly,” Zito said. “When those scouts talk about players, they go on and on and on, and they’ll debate and they’ll exchange information, and then they’ll critique the information and finally arrive at a conclusion on a player, and then they’re OK with it. ... Everyone will get listened to. At the end of the day, sometimes with decisions, there’s disagreements, but ‘OK, we’re all in still’ and that’s tremendously valuable.”
And he looks to his amateur scouting department to help add to the team’s prospect pool despite being bereft of top draft picks most years because Zito has used most of his top picks to swing trades. That group has hit on some big names — Anton Lundell and Mackie Samoskevich with Florida’s lone two first-round picks of the Zito era, plus top prospects in Jack Devine, Hunter St. Martin and Gracyn Sawchyn, among others.
Regardless of the department, the onus remains the same.
“They’re pushing their guys, they’re pushing their staff to perform and to be accountable, but at the same time supporting them with the understanding they’re not perfect,” Zito said. “It works.”
So, too, does Bill Zito — and his ability to orchestrate all of this has the Panthers as perennial Stanley Cup contenders.
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