‘We think he can be special’: Paul Maurice excited about future for Seth Jones in Florida
Mar 3, 2025; Sunrise, Florida, USA; Florida Panthers defenseman Seth Jones (3) looks on against the Tampa Bay Lightning during the third period at Amerant Bank Arena. (Sam Navarro-Imagn Images)The process of Seth Jones learning and perfecting the defensive systems of the Florida Panthers is not going to be a quick process.
“Probably about a year and a half,” Panthers Head Coach Paul Maurice said earlier this week.
He wasn’t joking.
While Jones remains one of the top two-way blueliners in the game, Florida didn’t acquire him simply for the player he was in Chicago, and before that, in Columbus and Nashville.
When the Panthers evaluate potential players to add, they do it in the scope of how that player would perform within Maurice’s systems.
“Jonesy a year from now is going to be a dominant defenseman from this league,” Maurice said. “I really, truly believe that, but it's going to take some time. We're not disappointed by any means, it's just our view of him is very, very high. We think he can be special.”
That’s why the Panthers pulled the trigger on a deal for a player who still had quite a bit of meat left on a massive contract.
Jones’ deal pays him $9.5 million through 2030, and while Chicago agreed to cover $2.5 million of that average annual value (AAV), that is still a very big commitment for Florida to make.
It goes to show how sure Panthers General Manager Bill Zito and his staff were in acquiring Jones.
“This guy is a special player, we're very excited that he's not a one off, just finishing the year,” Maurice said. “He's part of our program now, a back end right hand shot that can get up the ice the way that he does. Eventually he'll play behind (Sasha) Barkov and (Sam) Bennett and (Matthew) Tkachuk and these guys, and we think he can be really, really lethal for us.”
THN Florida asked Maurice why he thinks that, and what areas he feels Jones will excel at once he’s fully wired into Florida’s way of playing.
“Playing with other players who can play at his speed,” Maurice said. “When he’s behind Barkov and those guys, he can get up (the ice). I could go into detail about it, but we’re just at a different place than those other programs. It’s not fair, it sounds like I'm picking on those other programs and I'm not, but when you get a player like that, and you can put him with four other guys on the ice that are in his ballpark, in terms of development – Barkov is in his prime, Jones is coming into his prime – you will eventually change the way you play because you can, because you can get up the ice, you can anticipate things that are happening, because the other four guys are going to do the exact same thing every time, and then that's where these guys get fast. That's why (Sam) Reinhart and Barkov are so good together. They have a really strong idea of what's going to happen next. So just time. In a year’s time, it'll be almost all instinct at that point. He's still learning systems, he's still learning the different players that we have, and those guys, those top end defensemen, play off the people they play with. So it's just time.”
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