‘Don’t play like [expletive]!’ Inside Maurice’s profane tirade that helped spark Panthers
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Paul Maurice prowled up and down the Florida Panthers’ bench and let it fly. “Don’t play like [expletive] [expletive]!” he screamed, using words that rhyme with “ducking” and “britches.”
The coach claims he’s not “a gifted curser,” but maybe what he really meant is he’s not creative because he got straight to the point with the Panthers in the second period Wednesday and maybe just helped spur them on to a come-from-behind, overtime upset of the Toronto Maple Leafs.
“I was just honest. It’s where I was at,” Maurice said Wednesday, finally smiling after Florida staged a last-minute comeback to beat the Maple Leafs in Toronto. “If I could’ve yelled louder or if I could’ve been [expletive] more profane than I was, I would’ve. ... I needed to channel my father, who’s a gifted curser. That’s all I had. I was honest. That’s how I felt.”
Said star defenseman Brandon Montour, in a bit of serious understatement: “He just didn’t like how we were playing a little bit.”
Florida Panthers pull off last-minute comeback in Toronto to keep playoff hopes alive
Did the tirade work? The results of the game certainly suggest it did and the Panthers did play slightly better after Maurice went off on them, even if they did require a goal in the last minute just to force overtime at Scotiabank Arena.
The rant came right as the game was slipping away from Florida. The Panthers led at the first intermission despite getting outshot 19-9 in the first period, but the Maple Leafs briefly thought they took a lead when they apparently scored two goals in about 30 seconds in the first five minutes of the second period. After the second, Maurice successfully challenged for offsides, but didn’t let up on his team.
Florida’s postseason hopes were on the verge of disappearing — its eventual win snapped a season-worst four-game losing streak — and Maurice ripped into everyone.
As Maurice stalked from side to side across the bench, All-Star right wing Matthew Tkachuk kept eye contact the entire time. After Toronto finished the first period with a 12-6 edge in scoring chances, the Panthers actually had more chances in the second, third and overtime.
“You don’t want to know,” All-Star center Aleksander Barkov said when asked what Maurice’s message was. “It definitely got us going and we started playing the right way.”
Maurice said he knew the call was going to be overturned when he decided to challenge the goal, but the stoppage still gave him some time to air out his grievances with his team.
“I thought it was a nice opportunity to share my feelings,” Maurice said with a smile.
The actual outburst was mostly spontaneous, he said. There wasn’t any performance to it.
“That was not calculated,” he said.
At the same time, he had to know would probably affect his team in some way.
If the Panthers folded and lost their fifth in a row, their season would effectively be over, with barely any chance to make the 2023 Stanley Cup playoffs and a profane tirade as the lasting image from the day their postseason hopes died. If the message to them, maybe it would spur a comeback and give Florida something to build on for the rest of its four-game road trip, which continued Thursday against the Montreal Canadiens in Quebec.
“This is something that can be a players’ win because the coach had lost orbit about halfway through the second,” Maurice said. “That’s theirs. They get to keep it.”
