Panthers head coach Paul Maurice addressed the media after a 5-4 loss to the Maple Leafs in Game 1 of the Eastern Conference semifinal playoff series.
On his view of the Sam Bennett-Anthony Stolarz incident:
Not nearly as good as the referee’s vantage point. He was standing right there. He saw it. Coaches coach.
You know what? We are hopeful for Anthony and his health. We love that guy. We hope he gets better really fast.
That was a bump at most on Stolarz from Bennett. I’d be willing to bet the slap shot to the face had more to do with it. pic.twitter.com/xHJZhxPpFr
— DeLo (@DeLo_77) May 6, 2025
On the Bennett-Stolarz incident, after a second question from a late-arriving reporter:
This is what is going to happen. You are all going to light your hair on fire, and I am going to let you. I have answered one on it. I understand that you are late. The referee was standing right there when it happened.
You will do your thing, the league will do its thing, and I’ll coach the next game, hopefully. After that start, you never know.
On his team’s slow start to the game compared to its finish:
You are not going to expect you can look either way again. You are hopeful that you don’t look the way you did at the start. But the other team is protecting a lead at that point (late in the game), so they are not going to look like that, either.
It was the perfect storm of “That’s not the way you want to start,” when everyone has lots of energy and jump. There is a tension to it at the start, so when you are behind one…
That was our first period. We didn’t look like ourselves. We righted it in the second, and after that, we had a pretty good push in the third.
On what he attributes the team’s slow start to:
Coaching. It is what I do.
On what the Leafs did early in the game that might’ve caught his team off guard in the first period:
They played us.
We are both going to look at it. They had the home-crowd jump. They were humping pretty good. We were late on just about everything that we did.
Yeah. That is about it. They were good. They were good on the start.
On the Panthers’ five-for-five night on the PK:
It is such a big part of our game. You are going to need to take some confidence out of a loss. That would be the piece to our game that kind of looked like how we were supposed to look in general. That’s solid.
