The first star of Game 7, the Florida Panthers’ top star on a team of stars, wasn’t mentioned Sunday night in Toronto. Bill Zito is rarely seen publicly these days, and when he is typically says in that soft rasp of a voice, “I’m just staying out of the way.”
So, all Sunday’s praise and all the cameras focused on the Florida Panthers biggest players, just as they deserved. They did the work Sunday. They dominated Toronto, 6-1. They’ve become a team to cherish in advancing to the Eastern Conference final for the third straight year.
You can go down the Panthers roster at all the players who impacted another defining win in a stretch of three springs of such wins. But none were bigger Sunday than the newcomers, Seth Jones and Brad Marchand.
Jones had the opening goal that changed Game 7 and again anchored the Panthers’ blue line. Marchand had two assists and the empty-net goal in winning his fifth career Game 7 against Toronto in five tries.
Jones and Marchand are linked by something beyond All-Star pedigree, too. They came at the trade deadline in March. They’re Exhibit A and Exhibit B of why the Panthers are better than when they won the Stanley Cup last year.
“We’re in the mode of going for it,’’ Zito said in trading young goalie Spencer Knight to Chicago for Jones and what will be a No. 1 pick to Boston for Marchand.
Since Zito became general manager of the Panthers four seasons ago, no one in any sport has run a better organization. It’s not just these past three years. A quarter-century of Panthers’ futility and unintentional comedy changed the minute he walked in the door.
Every championship team has that one guy who changed the franchise from the front office, and every flailing team wonders why they don’t. Sunday wasn’t the result of Zito’s work. It was the continuation of it.
It wasn’t just Jones and Marchand, as big as they were. Go through this Game 7. Anton Lundell, who scored the second goal, was Zito’s first draft pick. Sam Reinhart, who was on a nowhere team in Buffalo before Zito got him, iced the game with a fifth goal off a face-off.
Goalie Sergei Bobrovsky was a footnote by the end, but his first-period saves highlighted by a breakaway stop of Stephen Lorentz kept the night from tilting Toronto’s way.
Bobrovsky now has given up five total goals in his three Game 7 wins the past three playoffs. He also began this great Panthers stretch sitting on the bench for three games against Boston. That was better than not even dressing for a playoff game against Tampa Bay four postseasons ago.
What really changed for Bobrovsky was the Panthers went from a run-and-gun offensive team to an in-your-face defensive team under coach Paul Maurice. It was easy to ride Sunday’s 3-0 lead after two periods. But the Panthers’ 27-0 record the past three post-seasons when leading after two periods shows how they are built to close out games.
That’s the system Maurice brought, the one that allowed Bobrovsky to be an anchor of the defense, not an island of it. Maurice’s system instilled the confidence in Bobrovsky again. Of all the intangibles in sports, confidence is the one that comes and goes.
Maurice, again, was Zito’s bold call. They’d just won their first playoff series in a quarter-century. Remember? And now they were changing coaches?
You saw again Sunday what Maurice has brought to this team. Zito saw the need for it first.
Now they go to Carolina on Tuesday for another Game 1 and a run at a third straight Stanley Cup Final. Only three South Florida teams have pulled off the kind of sustained excellence that leads to three consecutive championship rounds.
The Heat’s Big Three went to the NBA Finals four straight years, winning two titles. The Miami Dolphins went to three straight Super Bowls from 1971-1973 and won two as well.
Those teams sit on Mt. Olympus in South Florida sports. Now the Panthers try to sit beside them. There’s still plenty of work left to get there. Zito, in some respect, is right. His work’s done by now. He could just stay out of the way all the way to another Stanley Cup, if it comes to that.
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