Empathy and Brutality: How Bill Zito’s Panthers Became the NHL’s Model Franchise

A look at the GM that built the 2024 and 2025 Stanley Cup Champions.

The Florida Panthers won the Stanley Cup last night, defeating the Edmonton Oilers 5-1 in Game 6, dominantly putting an exclamation point on back-to-back championships.

What the Panthers have done in the past four seasons is remarkable. They won the Presidents Trophy in 2022 with an interim coach at the helm, made one of hockey’s biggest trades that summer — jettisoning away an MVP candidate for another MVP candidate — and then reached three straight Stanley Cup Finals.

Bill Zito may not have won the GM of the Year Award during that time, and with all due respect to Dallas Stars GM Jim Nill, he’s be the best at his craft since he was hired by the Panthers in 2020.

Zito’s most recent championship had me thinking about a meeting I had with the Panthers GM back during February of the 2021-22 season, when the Panthers were in the middle of regular season barnstorm that would eventually end in playoff disappointment at the hands of their in-state rival, the Tampa Bay Lightning.

At that time Zito hadn’t yet made the decision to trade Jonathan Huberdeau. He also hadn’t made the decision to not give Andrew Brunette the full-time job, a post that we all know eventually went to Paul Maurice.

It was also Zito’s second season as a GM, having moved up from the associate role with the Columbus Blue Jackets.

One of the things that stuck with me from that conversation with Zito was about how much he hated trading players away. We were talking in a suite at at the arena, and he took a long deep sigh before saying, “it’s really the worst part. You come in and you have to be the person who decides to flip someone’s life upside down, make them tell their family that they have to go to faraway place, that kids have to move away from friends. That hurts every time.”

Zito continued, telling me how that ethos is one of the things that makes him really think about what he’s doing to a group of humans when making a trade or a roster move. The hockey is easy, the human relationships are what often can get in the way.

And less than six months after Zito and I had this conversation he made some of the hardest decisions, the Huberdeau for Matthew Tkachuk trade and not giving Brunette the head job.

It felt cold, both individuals had huge voices within the Panthers community, but both moves laid the groundwork for Florida to take center stage amongst the NHL’s elite.

I think an organization can often reflect the ethos of a general manager, and this can be both good and bad. The Vegas Golden Knights, for example, are very much a reflection of Kelly McCrimmon, they don’t care what anyone else thinks about them and they want to bully opponents.

The Dallas Stars are an extremely loyal team, almost loyal to a fault at times, and it’s a mirror image of how Nill runs things.

The Panthers are cold and calculated on the ice, the first five minutes of every game feels like a mini demolition derby to set the tone before they let skill fill the gaps physicality created. Off the ice it’s well known as one of the closest teams, a group that has evolved, but at it’s core is an empathetic group led by Aleksander Barkov where backup goalies and depth forwards hold as much importance as Barkov himself.

Zito understands this dynamic, he understands how the group is built, he also understands there’s a difficult, but happy medium when it comes to adding or subtracting from the group.

For example, trading for Seth Jones was the right move, it also led to Florida shipping Spencer Knight to Chicago. Knight didn’t play for Florida during the 2023-24 season, an extenuating fallout of his time in the NHL Player Assistance Program, but was still a key part of the Panthers team dynamic during the 2024 playoffs. He rejoined the team this season as a full-time member, played quite well as Sergei Bobrovsky’s backup and was turning into a feel-good story that would eventually take over as the No. 1.

Knight was traded to Chicago, it’s a move that on paper made sense, but Zito and the Panthers also had to stick the human landing.

We talk about culture all the time in hockey, and it’s often this catch-all term that no one really defines. How the “culture” of a team defines its chance of success or not.

In Florida, the culture is one where empathy and brutality have found a way to co-exist, and as Zito finds ways to keep building his résumé — the Brad Marchand trade, for example — it makes it easier and easier for any move to pass the smell test for his team. Trust has been earned, largely because empathy never left the conversation.