Owner Vinnie Viola talks Tkachuk, Kentucky Derby and how Panthers became a playoff staple

Vincent Viola, for at least one night, was living the exact same experience as thousands and thousands of other Florida Panthers fans across the state. He was holed up at home — in his “man cave,” to be exact — and stressing out about the heart-pounding Game 7 with the Bruins in Boston. The owner was trying to soak up all the stories he could find about the upset from those who were at TD Garden and, almost 24 hours later, he was still on a high.

“My feet still aren’t touching the floor,” Viola said Tuesday.

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Right now, there might not be a single owner across sports who has it better.

His Panthers, the team he has owned since 2015 and suddenly turned into one of the most successful franchises in the NHL, just pulled off perhaps the greatest upset in the history of the Stanley Cup playoffs and now is in Round 2 for only the third time ever. Forte, a horse he owns, is favored to win Viola his second Kentucky Derby Trophy.

There’s only one problem: The 2023 Kentucky Derby is Saturday and Florida’s first home game of the second round might be, too.

Talk about first-world problems.

“I’m very lucky,” Viola said.

In Sunrise, luck is only part of it. The decade since Viola bought the Panthers, Florida has been to the Cup playoffs five times, is in the middle of a four-year postseason streak and is right now one of only three teams in the NHL to reach the second round of the playoffs in back-to-back seasons.

The Panthers are in a better spot than at any point in their 30-year history, and their first-round upset comes on the heels of a three seasons of upheaval.

In the past three years alone, Florida has hired a new general manager, a new coach and traded one of the best players in team history.

“Generally, it seems like we’re on a stable route to excellence,” Viola said.

The path, he believes, started about five years ago when his ownership “redoubled” on its commitment to winning after a “critical and honest” assessment of how the first five years went. In 2019, the organization announced plans to revitalize the War Memorial Auditorium in Fort Lauderdale and turn it into a practice facility, then hired three-time champion Joel Quenneville as its new coach and gave star goaltender Sergei Bobrovsky seven-year, $70 million deal.

The Panthers made the 2020 Stanley Cup playoffs at the end of the season — although, only because they were expanded because of the COVID-19 pandemic — and then started making even more changes. They hired Bill Zito in 2020, and the general manager has completely reshaped the roster, trading away four first-round picks, as well as star left wing Jonathan Huberdeau and star defenseman MacKenzie Weegar in a trade to get superstar right wing Matthew Tkachuk from the Flames in the offseason.

Only three players — Bobrovsky, star defenseman Aaron Ekblad and All-Star center Aleksander Barkov — are still left from when Zito took over, and he even moved on from former interim coach Andrew Brunette to instead hire coach Paul Maurice last year after Florida flamed out in the second round of the 2022 Stanley Cup playoffs.

“We’ve been at about a 99.9 percent hit rate,” Viola said. “Bold is the wrong word because bold is a derivative of ego, but it was a big change.”

The evidence is in the on-ice results, but Viola sees it more in the connection the Panthers have built with South Florida in the past few years.

The Panthers had the third-best average attendance in franchise history in the regular season and it bumped up by nearly 2,000 fans per game from their Presidents’ Trophy-winning campaign last year.

“That’s really why I wanted to do a couple of interviews,” Viola said, “to really explain to the fans how much a part of this they are and how often the players talk about what it’s like to be in the building when there’s enough fans — and it wasn’t always like this, I might add — where they’re feeling the energy and getting lifted.”

It has been a process for Florida to build trust, and the past five years or so have mostly done it through “many, many, many, many small steps,” Viola said.

He points to the War Memorial as one major change. It fits in with the 10-year vision the Panthers have had, spearheaded especially by president Matt Caldwell, to build an on-the-ground connection to the community through learn-to-play programs and youth leagues.

“Our thought,” Viola said, “was if we can get a place in downtown Fort Lauderdale, where we can get kids that normally wouldn’t play the game on the ice and around the team because the team would practice there, it’s going to be one and one makes four.”

The success on the ice helps, too. Florida had never reached the postseason in three straight years before this run, and Zito’s aggressive maneuvering, even if fans don’t always agree with the decisions, are at least evidence of an effort to constantly try to improve. Now, it’s hard to argue with his methods as the Panthers face the Toronto Maple Leafs in Round 2, starting Tuesday in Canada.

It helps that his most aggressive move has worked out best. When Florida traded Huberdeau last year, the winger was the Panthers’ all-time leading scorer, and yet Florida saw an opportunity to get even better by trading him to Calgary for Tkachuk.

Huberdeau was one of the most popular figures in Panthers history. Tkachuk is already on another level, both because of the 109 points he scored in the regular season and the 11 he had in Round 1, but also because of his fiery personality on the ice and how deeply he has embraced Florida off it.

“I would’ve never imagined a young man of his age to sort of carry the amount of maturity and emotional intelligence, and social awareness and just basically he’s a very kind individual,” Viola said. “Matthew has been a leader in the community, a leader in the dressing room and he’s quickly become the face of the franchise.”