C. Stiles Bouwmeester just wants to forget about a 6-2 loss to the Minnesota Wild. C. Stiles Rookie Panthers coach Peter DeBoer knows that winning fans in South Florida won't be easy. C. Stiles The Florida Panthers and star JayBouwmeester toil in obscurityBy Thomas Francis published: November 13, 2008 It's halfway through the first period of the Florida Panthers' game against the Minnesota Wild. Panthers goaltender Tomas Vokoun skates behind the goal to retrieve a puck. He whacks at it, trying to send it around the boards. But his fat goaltender's stick misses the puck. No time to swing again. Wild center Mikko Koivu is nearly on top of him. Fortunately, Panthers top defenseman Jay Bouwmeester is coming to the rescue. Bouwmeester is two inches taller and about 20 pounds heavier than Koivu. That advantage means Bouwmeester can slam Koivu into the boards before he can get to the puck. That kind of aggression is second nature to burly Canadians. But Bouwmeester doesn't deliver. Because Koivu has his balance as well as a free arm, he pushes the puckin front of the net. With a flash, another Wild player flicks it past Vokoun for the game's first goal. A quiet arena get s a little quieter. Later, the Panthers will release an attendance figure of more than 12,000. Even that dismal figure, however, is inflated by all the tickets given to guests who never showe d. And it's even more dis appointing in light of a recent team promotion that bestows two complimenta ry tickets on any soul with a Florida driver's license. It's plain to see that the BankAtlantic Center, an arena that seats more than 20,000, isn't half full. It's only the Florida Panthers' http://www.browardpalmbeach.com/content/printVersion/648761/
This document is posted to help you gain knowledge. Please leave a comment to let me know what you think about it! Share it to your friends and learn new things together.
Transcript
8/3/2019 Jay Bouwmeester - New Times Broward-Palm Beach
their case for contender status. Besides, there's no
doubting the sheer potential of a team that's beenstocked with so many top draft picks – even if that
harvest resulted from a string of losing seasons.
Last year, the Panthers lost 25 games by only one
goal, a statistic that suggests they're on the brink – or that they're merely victims of bad luck.
The Panthers had an anemic start in 2007, winning just seven of their first 19 games, a
deficit they had to rally against the rest of the year only to narrowly miss the playoffs. If they
could just start quickly this year, maybe the fans would follow, and then this franchise could
finally have what it has missed for a decade: momentum.
Among the players, none has more at stake than Bouwmeester, who was the top-rated playerin the 2002 draft and has been a mainstay on the Panthers blue line ever since. Only recently
turned 25, Bouwmeester (usually pronounced Bo-mister) is the second-most-tenured
Panther.
Bouwmeester was an All-Star in 2007 and just missed earning that honor again last year.
This season, there's greater urgency for him to do well. Last summer, Bouwmeester rejected
the Panthers' efforts to sign him to a long-term contract, signing instead to a one-year deal,
effectively inviting the team to deal him midseason to a team with a better chance to win the
Stanley Cup. That is, unless the Panthers suddenly become a Cup contender themselves.
A significant share of that responsibility – given his nearly $5 million salary – belongs to
Bouwmeester. "First thing is that you have to make the playoffs," he says after a recent game.
"That's something that hasn't happened here for a number of years."
Eight, in fact.
Bouwmeester has the skills to be a franchise player, and it's tempting to blame the franchise
that he's not. After all, the Panthers adopted this prodigy when he was 18, and over his five
seasons, he has been passed among a dizzying array of caretakers – a carousel of faces in the
front office and behind the bench. The knock on Bouwmeester has always been that he
doesn't play with enough passion, toughness. But it's hard to be a fiery player withoutfired-up fans.
Perhaps the real question is whether the Panthers and South Florida were ever compatible to
begin with. Maybe a fan base that doesn't clamor for a glimpse at the Hall of Fame talent that
lies within Jay Bouwmeester doesn't deserve to see it realized. If that's the case, then it's hard
to blame Bouwmeester for beginning to pack his bags.
A month before the 2002 NHL draft, the Panthers flew Bouwmeester to South Florida to
meet him face to face. It was the first time he'd seen the ocean, and Bouwmeester told a
reporter, "That just blew me away."
As the draft approached, though, Bouwmeester seemed increasingly queasy about the
expectations that awaited him on the other side. "It's an honor, really, to get all the attentionI've gotten," the 18-year-old said just days before he became the Panthers' first-round pick.
"But I keep asking myself what it really means if I don't keep getting better and prove myself
in the NHL. That's a man's league. I'm still a kid."
Dan Bouwmeester guesses that his son handled a hockey stick "before he could walk," which
means that he was younger than nine months. And he could skate not long after he walked,
which means not long after his first birthday. Of course, neither of these is particularly
exceptional in western Canada, where Jay Bouwmeester was raised. Nor is it rare to have a
rink in one's backyard, as the Bouwmeesters did. "It's Canada," Dan Bouwmeester says.
"We're fanatical about hockey."
Dan Bouwmeester played hockey at the University of Alberta, as did Rick Carriere, who kept
an eye on young Jay's performance. He had first seen Jay at a Christmas party when Carriere
was dressed as Santa and "along came Jay Bouwmeester to sit on Santa's knee." Dan brought
his son to the rink to skate at alumni functions, and Carriere noticed how effortlessly the boy
could skate backward – and with speed, a skill that marks a great defenseman. Carriere
would become general manager of the Medicine Hat Tigers, and when Jay turned 16,
Carriere made the boy the first pick in the Canadian junior-league draft.
"He was a phenomenal, phenomenal skater," Carriere recalls. "To see him at 16 come flying
out of the zone with the puck, drive the net, and score, you knew he was special. When he was 15, he could have played in the [National Hockey] League."
Carriere's Medicine Hat team was young, however, and even with Bouwmeester in the
lineup, the Tigers were a last-place club. That hardly mattered to fans. "We played in front of
a packed house every night in Medicine Hat," Carriere says. The arena seated 4,000, and a
sellout is no small feat considering there are fewer than 60,000 residents of Medicine Hat,
which is isolated in Alberta's southeast corner. (This past March, the team just barely missed
a sellout, ending a streak that had stretched across five seasons and nearly 200 games.)
If that weren't enough buzz over Bouwmeester, in 2000, he was selected to play for Canada's
under-18 national team. At 16, he was the youngest player ever to be chosen for that team —and one of only three other 16-year-olds. None of those were defensemen, however, so
Bouwmeester started earning comparisons to Hall of Famers like Larry Robinson and Paul
Coffey.
In that company, even a kid from Edmonton is liable to develop an ego. Instead, young
Bouwmeester seemed embarrassed over the attention. He was polite but quiet, a bit
withdrawn. "Kind of like Gary Cooper," chuckles Jim Matheson, a Hockey Hall of Fame
sportswriter who covered Bouwmeester for the Edmonton Journal . "It's tough to get him to
say more than a few words."
By spring 2002, the foremost player ranking service, NHL Central Scouting, named
Bouwmeester the world's best pro prospect, citing his six-foot-four frame, his booming
slapshot, and his knack for always being in the right place on the ice. But the most dazzlingendorsement came from Bobby Orr, considered the best defenseman to play the sport, who
predicted that by the time Bouwmeester retired, they'd be saying the same about him.
If Bouwmeester had been uncomfortable with his celebrity in Canada, then he could hardly
find a professional hockey market that offered more anonymity than South Florida, where
the Panthers ranked in the league's bottom five in attendance.
Heading into the 2002 draft, the Panthers hadn't won a playoff game in five years. The team
hadn't fielded a star defenseman since it traded Ed Jovanovski in 1999. Bouwmeester looked
like the missing piece of a team stocked with talented young forwards and already with a
franchise goalie, Roberto Luongo.
Rick Dudley, who was then the Panthers' general manager, made the call to draft
Bouwmeester. "Jay's range backwards and his skating forward are in the stratosphere –
dimensional," Dudley says. "His ability to go from one side of the ice to the other is
unmatched." While scouts sometimes watch a player for hours to see a flash of greatness,
Dudley says that with Bouwmeester, "It took five minutes to see he had it."
By October 2002, shortly after his 19th birthday, Bouwmeester signed a contract that would
pay him more than $1 million a year. Now, all he had to do was make good on those lofty
expectations and he'd help turn this Panthers franchise into a winner again.
Pop the name Bouwmeester into YouTube and the first two videos describe two different
players. The first one, from a game in November 2005, shows Bouwmeester delivering a
hard check to Pittsburgh's Maxime Talbot. The Penguins center takes umbrage to the hit and
taunts Bouwmeester, who drops his gloves on the spot. Judging by the tape, the smaller
Talbot somehow lands a few more punches. Now in his fifth NHL season, it is the only fight
of Bouwmeester's career. Although he didn't win that scrap, he at least didn't embarrass
Lacking that quality, opposing players are bolder about standing in front of the Panthers net,
where they can deflect a teammate's shot for a goal. Or they're obliged to bully smaller
Panthers players, daring Bouwmeester to come to his teammate's aid.
Campbell isn't even convinced that Bouwmeester really makes his teammates better,
pointing to the losing records that followed him from junior hockey in Medicine Hat into the
NHL with the Panthers.
Dan Bouwmeester has been hearing critics talk about his son's lack of toughness for years. It
still quickens his temper. "Anybody who says he's not tough is out to lunch," he snaps. He
cites a game last season when his son roughed up Montreal Canadiens wing Alexei Kovalev
in retaliation for a hit on Panther center Nathan Horton.
But that kind of rough play is a rarity for Bouwmeester. Last year, no defenseman in hockey
played more minutes than Jay Bouwmeester, partly because he managed to stay out of the
penalty box. By Dan Bouwmeester's reckoning, it takes more guts to stay on the ice and risk
eating a 100-mph slapshot than it does to skate to the penalty box. "Some of these detractors
should try standing in front of a net for 30 minutes a night before they talk about toughness."
The Panthers take at least some of the blame for Bouwmeester's inability to meet his
potential. The front office has been unable to develop a star forward, despite seven top 10
draft picks in the past ten years. The Panthers blundered mightily in trading away star goalie
Roberto Luongo. They've also gone through coaches at a rate that would make George
Steinbrenner blush.
After Bouwmeester was drafted, he was coached by the legendary Mike Keenan. In
Bouwmeester's second year, Keenan was fired, replaced on an interim basis by Dudley, who
gave way to John Torchetti in 2004. When Keenan returned to the franchise as GM, he brought in yet another new coach, Jacques Martin, who also assumed the GM's job when
Keenan left in 2006. After last season, Martin stepped down as coach but remained as GM,
hiring Peter DeBoer behind the bench. DeBoer, a decorated junior hockey coach, came in
with no experience leading a pro team. He is Bouwmeester's fifth coach in five pro seasons.
"It's fair to say that the Panthers are one of the worst-run franchises in the NHL, and it
shows in their record," says Scott Burnside, hockey analyst for ESPN.com. "What would Jay
Bouwmeester be like if he'd have gone to a team with more stability in coaching and general
management?"
To Dan Bouwmeester, that's a tantalizing question. It's evident that he's been frustrated notonly by the way the Panthers have handled his son but by the very existence of a hockey team
in a region that doesn't appreciate it. "It shouldn't even be in the NHL," he says. "It's not a
hockey town. Why is it even down there?"
The Panthers training facility sits on a scorched tract of land just east of the Sawgrass
Expressway, off Sample Road in Coral Springs. The 40-degree disparity between outside and
in keeps the automatic glass doors fogged. At Panthers practices, the chilly air combines with
the sight of so many Anglo faces with their Canadian and European voices, making these
players seem like exotic species kept in captivity made to resemble their natural habitat. But
Dan Bouwmeester's question is hard to answer: Why is a hockey team down here?
Ostensibly, the players are emissaries of their imported sport, and the Panthers were created15 years ago thanks to the league's interest in popularizing the NHL in a big media market
that otherwise had little reason to follow hockey.
The original team owner was Waste Management and Blockbuster Video magnate H. Wayne
Huizenga, who must have soured on his investment as the team struggled to locate fans in
the late '90s. In 2001, he sold the franchise to an investment group led by Alan Cohen, a
pharmaceutical entrepreneur, for $101 million. A study by Forbes magazine last year
estimated the team's value at $151 million. But partly due to low ticket sales, the Panthers
were one of the few teams that operated at a loss. Forbes ranked the Panthers the 23rd most
valuable franchise out of the 30 in the NHL. The team occupies roughly the same lowly place
in attendance, drawing only about 15,000 per game, a number that has held steady for the
past three years.
But those fans can be expected to follow this team only if it wins, which it has not — at least
not lately. Twelve years have passed since the Panthers made an improbable run to the
Stanley Cup Finals (where they were swept by the Colorado Avalanche). Since then, the
Panthers have posted a record of 338 wins, 385 losses, and 145 ties or overtime losses. Over
that lengthy span, the team has won only a single playoff game.
Entering this season, there was little to suggest the team could reverse its slide. In the
offseason, the Panthers traded its leading scorer, Olli Jokinen. "Obviously, it means that me, Weiss, Olesz, and Booth all need to do a lot more than we have," says Nathan Horton, who
was the third pick in the 2003 draft. Rostislav Olesz (pronouncedOH-lesh) was the seventh
pick in the 2004 draft, while David Booth was the team's second-round pick that same year.
To this nucleus of underachievers, the Panthers added a veteran overachiever. Cory Stillman,
a balding 34-year-old with a knack for scoring goals, is playing on his sixth NHL team. The
hope is that Stillman can provide steadiness on a roster of young players whose collective
pride may still be smarting after last year's many one-goal losses. "It could be a lot of things,"
Stillman says after practice, knitting his brow like a doctor inspecting an x-ray. "But the
biggest thing is having confidence that you're going to win if you're up by a goal – or if you're
down by a goal. It's a habit to come to the rink expecting to win."
Bouwmeester comes off as more circumspect than his teammates, maybe because he has
spent more time with the Panthers franchise. "It's easy to be positive this time of year," he
says, speaking after practice, two weeks before the start of the regular season. "There's some
optimism. We have new coaches, new players, an investment in defense. And everyone's got
But in Bouwmeester's monotone, with his habit of shrugging, looking over the head and to
the side of whomever he's talking to, he sounds like someone who's placed his car for sale
and is trying to remember its best attributes.
If so, it's understandable given Bouwmeester's uncertain future with the franchise. Panthers
GM Jacques Martin was apparently so pessimistic about whether Bouwmeester would stay
that he acquired three defensemen this past offseason: Bryan McCabe, Nick Boynton, andKeith Ballard.
At the very least, it means Bouwmeester isn't likely to repeat as the NHL's ice-time leader,
which he admits "would be nice, I guess."
In the locker room after a 6-0 victory in a preseason game, Bouwmeester is slightly more
effusive than usual. He is not offended that only a half-filled BankAtlantic Center bore
witness to his goal and the team's triumph: That's hockey in South Florida. "It's different, but
everywhere is different," Bouwmeester says. "You take it for what it is. If you don't have
much success, the fans don't pay that much attention to you, but it's an open market, and as
long as you win, you're going to get fans here."
Typically, though, South Florida sports fans need winning and colorful sports personalities
— Dan Marino, Shaquille O'Neal, Dwyane Wade. The Panthers, it seems, need a player who
can both dominate a game and be a flamboyant ambassador out of uniform. Bouwmeester
may be the only Panther who meets the first requirement, but he's not interested in being the
latter.
"Part of the problem with Jay Bouwmeester," says ESPN's Scott Burnside, "is that he's not a
particularly dynamic kid off the ice. He's a good western Canadian boy who does all his
talking on the ice. He's not like [Washington Capitals star] Alexei Ovechkin or [ChicagoBlackhawks star] Patrick Kane, whose personalities lend themselves to that kind of
marketing. But there's no question [Bouwmeester] has the talent to be a franchise player."
That preseason game October 6 versus the New York Islanders provided a vivid reminder.
During a second-period power play, as Stillman chased the puck in the corner, Bouwmeester
crept in from the right point. He flashed into a passing lane that Stillman anticipated
perfectly. Bouwmeester one-timed Stillman's pass into the goal. That looked so easy, it's hard
to imagine why it would take more than a month before a Bouwmeester shot found the net
again.
On October 16 against the Minnesota Wild, the Panthers manage to score a goal in the
second period, but they're still behind 2-1. For nearly ten minutes, the teams play to a
stalemate. Then, with the Wild on a power play, the Wild's Mikko Koivu handles the puck
near the right face-off dot. Peripherally, he spots an opening between Bouwmeester, fellow
defenseman Nick Boynton, and Panthers rookie Gregory Campbell. Koivu fires a pass
through that slot. The puck finds Minnesota's Antti Miettinen, who wrists a shot over a