You can paint a picture of Paul Maurice’s career that looks like this:
Maurice was fired three times as an NHL coach before arriving in Florida. Teams he coached made the playoffs eight times, missed the playoffs sixteen times, and only won one conference title. His success in Florida, with two conference titles in two seasons and now a Stanley Cup, demonstrates that coaches aren’t all that important. The roster is what counts, and this roster was good enough for even a coach with more career losses than wins to earn a title.
You can paint a different picture of Paul Maurice’s career that looks like this:
Maurice had an 8–8 record in playoff series before arriving in Florida. Considering playoff teams are definitionally almost all above average, that’s a solid mark. As he’s joked, the Panthers performed worse in the regular season following his arrival, but over the course of two years at the helm, his discipline and defensive focus gradually turned a talented team into one that won games it needed to win, most notably one specific game in the face of what would have been an historic collapse. This all demonstrates that the right coach is important, and that Maurice was the right coach for this team.
You can paint a third picture of Paul Maurice’s career that looks like this:
Paul Maurice coached in his tenth playoffs this year. In a world in which the Stanley Cup Playoffs were completely random, 48% of coaches would be expected to win a title within their first ten tries in the tournament. This proves nothing, but it fits with the theory that playoff hockey is a random sport. Give everybody ten chances, and half of them will lift at least one Cup.
I don’t know which of these three is true. My hunch, especially given the situations in which Maurice coached (many of which involved recently relocated teams), is that he’s a better coach than the first picture paints but that the second overstates his importance. The Panthers’ really was a loaded roster. Bill Zito did a tremendous job assembling it. Maurice was probably a good coach for the roster, too, though, although the impressiveness of fighting off a 3–0 collapse is nixed by the embarrassment of nearly turning in a 3–0 collapse. The third summation is tempting, but ultimately, it falls flat. The playoffs aren’t entirely unpredictable.
In a lot of sports (notably not football, which is probably why this phenomenon gets glossed over), it’s hard to tell how much coaches matter. As usual, baseball has grappled with this to the greatest extent. I’m not sure hockey or basketball or soccer has thoroughly explored the concept. Did the Panthers win the Stanley Cup because of Paul Maurice? Or did Paul Maurice win the Stanley Cup because he got to coach these Panthers? There isn’t a good way to know. It’s a Rorschach Test, one laden with recency bias and confirmation bias and all other sorts of misleading mental crutches. Maurice is a good quote, and a charming guy, and whether he’s one of the best coaches in the game or merely an average general behind the bench, a lot of people are very happy for him, including us. Unfortunately for those with a vested interest in hiring good hockey coaches, that only muddies the waters even further. Fortunately for us, we are not those people.
Miscellany
- Was Alex Meruelo trying to get out of Coyotes ownership when he put all his chips behind the land auction in Arizona? The story, for those who don’t know, is that Meruelo agreed to sell the Coyotes to Utah under the condition that he’d be given the opportunity to reincarnate the Coyotes once he built a suitable arena. He chose a parcel of land that was to be auctioned off this month. Last week, the auction was canceled because it wasn’t properly zoned to be an NHL arena. Meruelo should have known this. Now, he’s out of the ownership group, which means that while the NHL could still eventually expand back into Arizona and use the Coyotes name, Meruelo wouldn’t be involved. I don’t get it. I don’t get this guy’s motivations for doing the things he did.
- Novak Djokovic practiced on the grass yesterday at Wimbledon, four days before the tournament’s draw. He’s expected to decide later this week if his knee can hold up three weeks after surgery for a torn meniscus.
