SUNRISE — This is what it looks like, feels like, sounds like.
“Everything in this organization is the best,’’ Florida Panthers defenseman Aaron Ekblad said.
This is why it happens, how it happens, who will keep it happening.
“It’s not slowing down,’’ team captain Aleksander Barkov said.
There’s so much vapid talk of “culture” and “leadership” around sports, especially South Florida sports, especially on teams lacking them of late. So, listen to the two-time champs on these subjects. Listen to what matters and how they win.
“We’re the best team on the ice, and I guarantee we’re the best team off the ice,’’ Matthew Tkachuk said.
Which means?
“A quick, little story,’’ Tkachuk said. “(Ekblad) and I are driving after we landed after Game 5 (in the Stanley Cup Final), going back to our houses, down Las Olas (Boulevard). And we see just a couple guys on Edmonton walking to dinner.
“And that’s just a huge thing for us. We had 40 or 35 — whatever it was — at every single dinner on the road this year. And it’s just, like, no team does that. Our team’s closer than every team. Our players, trainers, the staff that doesn’t get enough credit — we’re doing everything together.
“So I think that just builds our bonds. It helped with us starting every series on the road. We spent that much more time together.”
Dinners were moved up an hour these playoffs.
“We’d play so much hockey we were tired,’’ forward Sam Reinhart said.
You can say team dinners don’t matter, if you want. And it doesn’t really matter at all that the Panthers players’ wives and girlfriends met in an arena before each game to share a shot together (some had water).
“It wasn’t just one shot,’’ Tkachuk said.
Here’s the point: All this is a prism into something bigger, something when woven together only the best teams have.
“Love,’’ coach Paul Maurice came to call it his first year with the team. “That’s the only word I could think of.”
Does that help any? Can you understand what makes a special team so special?
“They’re servant leaders,” team owner Vinny Viola said. “The best on this team always put other people before them. They really do. You can see it on the ice. You can see it off the ice. That’s what makes this team work.”
Talent is the given, of course. The Panthers were deeper, stronger, flat-out better than anyone thanks to general manager Bill Zito’s front office. Zito didn’t do it the easy way with years of high draft picks, too. He did it with bold trades, one after another. Tkachuk. Reinhart. Sam Bennett. Brad Marchand.
“Seth Jones is a good example,’’ Maurice said. “It’s not all on him (as in Chicago). He’s in a room of equals. He can just play his game. If I had talent, this would be the team I’d want to play on.”
Chicago pays 25% of Jones’ $9.5 million salary, too. So he costs the Panthers just over $7 million. It’s hard to keep winning in a league with a hard salary cap as the looming free agency of Bennett, Marchand and Ekblad says
But Zito has managed the contracts as well as the Panthers managed Edmonton star Connor McDavid. Gustav Forsling at $6.2 million? Anton Lundell at $5 million? Niko Mikkola, for one more year, at $2.5 million?
Then again, these players defined their careers here. That gets to another component of this culture. Maurice brought a physical system that gets the most out of players. He backed it up with non-negotiable ideas just like another South Florida legend once did.
Or is it sacrilegious to compare his opening two titles and third championship series to Miami Dolphins coach Don Shula’s two titles and a third Super Bowl trip?
Maurice, like Shula, isn’t soft or easy beneath the good humor and good suits. The first five days of training camp, for instance, are the toughest practices of the year. That resets the culture from the start.
“It surprised me they were just as hungry to win this year, but when I got here in training camp I saw it,’’ said forward A.J. Greer, who signed on this season. “Something else that stood out is the last game of preseason. That last one, guys usually take a little easier. But here they were, full workouts before the game.
“It was like we didn’t even have a game. Guys were power lifting (weights), doing lower and upper body. Bike sprints. And I’m just thinking to myself, ‘These guys are dialed in.’ I’d never seen it quite like this. I thought, ‘OK, maybe it’ll be a one-month thing and drop off.’ There’s no drop-off. That’s the culture. It’s reset every day, come in and work, one day at a time.”
It isn’t a sure thing every year, too.
“Culture can be brought in, but it quickly can go out the door, too,’’ Greer said. “You see it all the time. So, it’s the way that these leaders respect that culture and keep the culture within the group that matters. Every player, after every win or loss, has to respect it. That’s how it is here.”
That’s who they are. That’s how it’s done. Maurice was in summer gear — shorts and short-sleeved shirt Saturday — in meeting with players one final time. He also met with his coaching staff about next year’s training camp, believe it or not.
“It’s pretty cool, we’re going to change some things,’’ he said.
The players know the rare opportunity ahead, too. A three-peat?
“We’ll have to bring ourselves back to humble, back to zero,’’ goalie Sergei Bobrovsky said.
For now, they’ll party like champions. That’s a developed part of their culture, too, the part only special teams ever reach.
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