FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. (AP) — Paul Maurice will see the video tributes, whether he thinks they're warranted or not. He'll hear the ovation from fans, see players tapping their sticks on the ice in the hockey version of applause and give a wave in what will probably be a futile effort to make it all stop. He'll listen to the kind words, and he'll say “thank you” a whole bunch of times.
It will be the sort of night he dreads — because it'll be a celebration
of him.
Maurice, the coach who has led the Florida Panthers to back-to-back Stanley Cup titles and has tried to deflect anything that resembles credit even during that amazing run of success, will be behind the bench for his 2,000th regular-season game on Tuesday night. The Panthers will play host to the Seattle Kraken, and when the puck drops Maurice will join Scotty Bowman as the only coaches to reach that milestone.
“It truly means that I was incredibly fortunate for a very, very long time," Maurice said. "It means I had very special people around me early in my career, from playing to transitioning into coaching.”
Bowman was 67 when he reached 2,000 games. Maurice is only 59. He was the fifth-youngest coach in NHL history — just 28 — when he got his first job in 1995, he was 43 when he reached the 1,000-game mark, and he's showing no signs of slowing down now.
At his current pace, he'd pass Bowman's mark of 2,141 games during the 2027-28 season.
“The enormity of the accomplishment gets lost in the character of the man,” Panthers hockey operations president and general manager Bill Zito said. “He's so loath to make a big deal about himself. Maybe that's the equation; everything to him is about the team — everything — and maybe that's why he's able to do these things.”
Some of the numbers are wild, when adding up everything that's happened so far in Maurice's career.
There have been 400 other coaches in the century-plus history of the NHL; Maurice has coached against 171 of them, or almost half of the league's all-time list. He's had 387 different players get into at least one game during his tenure. He's coached against 3,068 different players. And after all this time, the scoreboard for Maurice's career is remarkably close: 5,691 goals for his teams, 5,678 goals against his teams.
The Panthers’ reign as champions is about to end after a season that was doomed from the start by injuries, but the core will be back next season — and everyone in the Florida dressing room points to Maurice as one of the absolute reasons why a once-moribund franchise is no joke anymore.
“I hope that there’s a player that says, ‘He changed my career,’" Maurice said. "And I like to think of those guys almost as the guys who play on your third and fourth line who find their game and then they go on to play somewhere else and do really well. And then, you hope there’s at least one guy says, ‘Yeah, that’s the best coach I’ve ever played for.’
"I had a player say that to me once a few years back, a guy that I had a couple times and he’d gone on and had a very long career. And that was the kindest thing that any player has ever said to me.”
His coaching career was born in many ways out of bad luck. Maurice was the final player taken in the 1985 NHL draft, No. 252 overall. He never made it to the league; an eye injury cut his playing career short. He likes to say he wasn't a particularly good player anyway, but he conveniently leaves out that he was also extremely smart.
And when Jim Rutherford — now the president of the Vancouver Canucks and a Hockey Hall of Famer — heard Maurice speak in his role as captain of the Windsor Spitfires back in the 1980s, he was quickly impressed.
Rutherford got him into coaching. A few years later, Rutherford was the general manager in Hartford and needed a coach. He convinced then-Whalers owner Peter Karmanos Jr. that Maurice was the right guy.
To this day, Maurice credits Karmanos and Rutherford for everything.
“I got gifted a bunch of chances, but they didn’t necessarily go so smoothly at the start," Maurice said. "So, there’s a mentorship, a friendship, and a protection — which probably is why I’m here — from Jim Rutherford. And that is what I think about now in those early years, how I was able to survive. It really wasn’t on my talent. I guess they saw something in me, but it was really on those men and the opportunity and protection that they gave me.”
If coaching hadn't happened, Maurice probably would have done something with words. Teaching was a strong possibility. Law might have intrigued him as well. He had no issues with his grades, but hockey was always his thing. School was a requirement; hockey was a passion. Hockey won.
“Given a chance of a class or an hour at the rink, I chose the rink," Maurice said. "I’m one semester away from a business degree but I haven’t taken a class in about 16 years, so that may have to wait.”
His choices seem to have worked out just fine. Tuesday's milestone will be one he endures more than celebrates, since he never wants the spotlight. Consider one of the first interviews he did after the Panthers won their first Stanley Cup in 2024 — he looked right into the television camera and spoke directly to his father, who was watching at the family's Ontario home. “Hey Dad, your name is going up with your heroes: Béliveau, Richard, Howe, Lindsay, Maurice," he said.
Even in that moment, it wasn't about himself.
If he had his way, Tuesday wouldn't be about him, either.
“We live in the age of superlative, but I'm not sure if there are words to describe what that means on so many levels,” Zito said. “Imagine, 2,000 — it’s very difficult to comprehend, and to be able to do it with the grace and class that he’s done it with is amazing.”
___
AP NHL: https://apnews.com/hub/nhl
