How Paul Maurice's son Jake gave him a new perspective on being 'a grump, old coach' (2024)

EDMONTON — After Game 1 of the Stanley Cup Final, a victory that put Paul Maurice three wins from his first Stanley Cup after 26 years behind an NHL bench, the Florida Panthers coach prefaced questions by congratulating the Florida Everblades for three-peating that night as Kelly Cup champs.

In addition to naming the team’s owner and coach in his praise, Maurice also offered congrats to “maybe even Jake Maurice.”

“My kid’s been in pro hockey two years. He has two rings,” Maurice deadpanned. “Possibly unbearable it’s going to be in my house.”

Well, Maurice is now one win away from making it a little less unbearable because he, too, is a panther’s whisker away from the pinnacle of his league and potentially sharing the moment with those who mean the most to him.

Saturday night, Father’s Day eve, the Maurice family — 25-year-old Jake Maurice; his 23-year-old brother, Luke, who’s a law student at the University of Miami; his 26-year-old sister, Sydney, who’s an English teacher at her old high school in Winnipeg; and their mom, Michelle — will be in Edmonton after taking a charter flight from Fort Lauderdale with the families of many other Panthers players and staff members to perhaps see a sweep of the Oilers and a Stanley Cup lifted over his dad’s head.

“My favorite part is he’s fallen in love with a game that I did but found a different way to fall in love with it,” Maurice said of Jake. “He’s probably more passionate about it than I am. That’s a fun thing to watch a kid go through. You always want them to find their purpose, find their thing, find their reason. And he had it at 16.”

Jake is a second-year broadcaster with the ECHL Everblades, who play a two-hour drive — across Alligator Alley at Hertz Arena in Estero, Fla. — from where his dad reports to work for Panthers home games. Jake does play-by-play for the Everblades’ road games remotely on FloSports and on radio on ESPN Southwest Florida. But at home, he does just about everything — as other young staffers often have to do when working in the minors.

He does rinkside reporting and co-hosts the pregame show with the team’s broadcasting intern. He does media relations, where he helps set up player and coach interviews. He does the game notes and stat packs and whatever other communication duties are assigned. During some games, he even sits in with the video coach and observes how plays are clipped.

“I’ve been learning a lot outside of broadcasting to just make me a more well-rounded media professional,” Jake told The Athleticon Friday.

… maybe a LITTLE insufferable https://t.co/Yz2bCnxHXP

— Jakemaurice_ (@Jakemaurice_) June 9, 2024

Let’s be honest: Jake’s dad has always been a media superstar.

Throughout Dad’s long coaching career, between jobs or during his teams’ offseasons, he has dabbled in TV on major networks in Canada. So he has an appreciation for what reporters do and all that goes on behind the scenes with producers, directors and tech people.

He recalled being in Austria doing the World Championship with Darren Dreger in 2005 when the TSN insider worked for Sportsnet.

“It’s about 11:30, it’s raining sideways, and we’re standing outside because we gotta feed something to a truck,” Maurice said. “I’m thinking, ‘This job sucks.’ But I remember going, ‘This is way harder than I thought.’”

Maurice has always been great with print and online reporters after practices and games, especially in the past few years. He has quick one-liners and plenty of jokes and is respectful, almost giving history lessons with every answer to help reporters shape their stories.

Few coaches will do that.

But Maurice acknowledged his son being in the media business has given him a new perspective on reporters.

“You’re someone’s kid, I know,” Maurice said. “You start to see that with your kid in the media. He’s going to ask some coach a question. … I’d be some kind of sour if a grump, old coach because he lost 3-2 — and I’ve done it, been in a bad mood and been pissy — but if you do that to my kid, I’m going to hate on you pretty quick.

“So I’m mindful when I come in here now. I’d like to think I was reasonably generous with my time, tried to be thoughtful when I answered my questions. … I try to be respectful of your time. You lose enough hockey games, you lose the arrogance that you’re special and your job’s special. We all have a job to do at the end of the day, and I know sometimes, especially in a seven-day block, you’re grinding. But I get it way better now than I did before. This doesn’t have to be an adversarial relationship.”

Jake has talked to his dad about this.

“It’s called ‘sonder’ when you realize that every other person you pass on the street has a life that’s just as full and vibrant as yours,” Jake said. “My dad knows that I’m a media member, and now when he looks at you all, he’s thinking, ‘This isn’t just some guy who’s trying to pull a quote out of me that he can use to go viral on Twitter or something. It’s a guy who’s trying to live his dream, feed his family, do his job in a way that he’s proud of and can go home at night, look in the mirror and say, ‘I did a really good job today.’ So you want to treat them with respect.

“Believe me, I get more than pretty much anyone in the world how hard and demanding his kind of job is, how hard the hockey operations job is. But everyone else who’s working in that building at Rogers Place, they’ve got a job, too. … They’re there to do a job. So even though it’s a job that may not get the accolades in the same way the hockey people do, it’s a job that’s important to them, and you want to respect that. So I think that’s how I’ve helped give him perspective.”

Spend 30 minutes talking to Jake and you realize the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.

When Oilers fans booed his dad profusely during pregame introductions before Game 3, Jake busted a gut watching his dad look at the camera and mouth, “Thank you.”

“I saw (Vladimir) Tarasenko smirk with it, too,” Jake said. “Hilarious.”

Jake has the same inflections as his father and a similar personality when it comes to thoughtful eloquence and humor.

What he really marvels over, though, is his dad’s quick wit and how he can come up with so many good lines on the spot after games.

“I’m trying to learn how to match it myself,” Jake said. “I’m not quite there yet. He’s always had it at home, too. It’s just natural talent.”

Earlier in the playoffs when Maurice was asked about blowing up on the bench at his team, he said, “I just thought they needed some profanity in their life, and I brought some. I don’t excel at a lot of things in life, but f— me, am I good at that.”

In this series, when Maurice was asked how he felt about Leon Draisaitl’s forearm to Aleksander Barkov’s jaw, he instantly responded: “This isn’t ‘The Oprah Winfrey Show.’ My feelings don’t matter.”

Before the series, when asked about the job he’s done in taking over after the Panthers won the Presidents’ Trophy and taking them to consecutive Finals, he said self-deprecatingly: “I showed up here and they had 122 points. I managed to get them down to 92 in one year. Brilliance.”

“After pretty much every single game in this playoffs, especially the last few rounds, someone comes in and says, ‘I loved your dad’s presser last night,’” Jake said. “It’s just a lot of fun knowing that people are really enjoying it just as much as I am. It’s not exactly new to me. I’ve known about this for 25 years now.”

Jake isn’t one of those up-and-coming play-by-play guys who used to pretend he was calling games at 7 years old. When he was in high school, he had no clue what he wanted to do. He just knew he wanted to work in hockey.

He tried a bunch of different things in university. Nothing was working, he said, so he eventually went into communications and considered becoming a sportswriter.

“It wasn’t quite what I was really hoping for,” Jake said. “One day I got a call from Dad, and he said, ‘Hey, I’ve heard about the Winnipeg Blues in the Manitoba Junior Hockey League. Their guy very abruptly left right before the season, and they need someone to just fill in for a game to call. Why don’t you go give it a try?’

“And I thought, ‘Sure, why not?’ It’s something I never had thought about it as a career path. I just figured I was going to go out there, drive an hour to Portage la Prairie, call one, maybe two games while they find someone and it’d be a cool little experience. I called the game, was terrible because I’d never called a game before, never knew anything about the league … but it was so much fun.

“I kept doing it and felt like I was getting better when I was able to get those first few names down repeatedly and get into a little bit of a rhythm, and then it just felt like I was doing what I was supposed to be doing. They wanted to keep me on, gave me a chance, and I spent three years there getting a lot better before making the step into the pros.”

When his dad got the Panthers job, Jake wanted to move to the United States. He knew his brother was already going to Miami, so he moved with his parents to Florida and looked for a job, ultimately landing an internship with the Everblades.

He’s mentored by Everblades play-by-play veteran Mike Kelly and feels like his call keeps improving. His dream is to one day call games in the NHL.

His style?

“I try to be pro-Everblades but not a homer,” he said. “I try to be balanced to give the other teams their props when they’re good. But for me, my style would just be always the action first. … If people want to hear someone’s take on what a team should do trade-wise, what can the second line do to improve, they’re going to go read The Athletic or listen to a podcast. But when they’re tuning in to watch that game tonight, they want to see what’s going on in that game.”

Jake’s proud of what his dad has achieved with the Panthers. It hasn’t always been easy, even in Florida when fans and Jake’s fellow media members questioned Bill Zito’s decision to fire Andrew Brunette after that 122-point season and the franchise’s first playoff series win since 1996.

“He was not nearly as popular as he is now with fans,” Jake said. “When there were some lean times, there were some ‘Fire Paul’ chants in the crowd. But I still knew that there was a process of vision that was going to work out.

“Now there’s a total buy-in.”

Jake knows how special Saturday night could be for his family if the Panthers and his dad pull off the NHL’s first Stanley Cup sweep since 1998. It will be especially gratifying, he said, for his mom.

“Mom sacrificed just as much, if not more, than Dad to make sure that he could pursue this career path,” Jake said. “When we were growing up, Mom is handling three really young kids by herself while Dad’s out in California on a week-and-a-half-long road trip. And Mom’s got to make sure we’re all getting to our hockey games, to whatever other sports we’re playing or clubs and stuff.

“She handled everything. She handled it well, really well, and she handled it in a way that made us all three grow up into what, I hope, she would describe, they would describe, as good young adults who are confident, happy, pursuing something they love.”

That’s why Jake said watching Paul hoist the Cup “would mean everything for us.”

“All the years of effort, all the sacrifices, everything he’s given up to get to this point and coming so close last year,” Jake said. “Same with 2002 with Carolina, 2018 with Winnipeg — all of that would be all worth it at last. It’s not quite the same because this isn’t the last year for him or anything like that, but in my head, I compare it almost to the Ray Bourque situation (with the Colorado Avalanche in 2001) where it’s someone who’s excellent at their job, who’s been waiting so long for it, and then finally, after years and years, has the opportunity to finally hoist the Cup.

“That would be priceless for our family to be there, watch him do that. It would be great for the Panthers fans to be there in person, but I’d rather just get this done in Edmonton on Saturday.”

And if Maurice does, he’ll be following in his son’s footsteps.

(Top photos: Bruce Bennett / Getty Images and courtesy of Jake Maurice)