Jay Bouwmeester - New Times Broward-Palm Beach

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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 Jay Bouwmeester toil in obscurity By Thomas Francispublished: 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 puck

in front of the net. With a flash, another Wild player

flicks it past Vokoun for the game's first goal.

A quiet arena gets 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 showed. And it's even more disappointing

in light of a recent team promotion that bestows two

complimentary 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/648



second home game, but fan apathy is in midseason

form.

Playing host to the undefeated Wild, this game

presents the Panthers with ample chance to make

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

himself.

Jay Bouwmeester vs Maxime Talbot




The same cannot be said of the second video. It shows a hit by Philadelphia Flyers

defenseman Denis Gauthier that sends Bouwmeester tumbling head over heels into the

Flyers bench.

Bouwmeester leveled by Denis Gauthier

According to the moral relativity that applies to the NHL, Bouwmeester would have been

expected to stand up and coldcock the nearest Flyer on the bench. Failing that, it would be

appropriate for him to hunt down Gauthier on the next shift and invite him to a slugging




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

a good attitude."




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




diving Tomas Vokoun.

This sequence, as well as the one that resulted in the Wild's first goal, are the ones that

Bouwmeester will remember as he sits in the locker room after the game, a 6-2 loss. He'll

have forgotten about the long, perfect outlet pass he made just before he was checked that

landed right on Campbell's stick as he streaked for a breakaway scoring chance. Nor will he

remember his poke check that spoiled what would have been a Wild breakaway.

Asked after the game to name a positive, a sulking Bouwmeester gives a rueful laugh. "This is

one you just try to forget and move on."

With the loss, the Panthers fall to 1-2. Coach DeBoer wears a strained expression at his

post-game news conference. Asked whether he noticed how few people were in the stands, he

answers, "No. I didn't. But we've got to give them something to cheer about, and tonight we

didn't."

The following week, on a South Florida radio program, NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman

snuffed out rumors that the Panthers franchise would be scrapped.

"It's mostly a Canadian fantasy that teams like Florida disappear and the league contracts

back to 24 or 26 teams," says Burnside, the ESPN analyst. "Unless Cohen gets tired of having

a lousy team in a lousy market, nobody's going to take the team away from him."

For a team that seems to lose a star every year, it would be heartbreaking to the team's few

fans to watch Bouwmeester go the way of Jokinen and Luongo. The chances of the strapping

defenseman's staying in Florida? "Slim," says Burnside, who named Bouwmeester among the

prizes that could be had at this season's trading deadline if the price is right. He thinks

Bouwmeester may play with more passion if he goes to a true hockey market, like those in

his native Canada, where he'll be reunited with rabid fans.

So far, Bouwmeester has avoided the subject of his commitment to the franchise, saying that

the future is up to the Panthers. But his father, Dan, seems to have two hands firmly on the

crystal ball. "I know what's going to happen," he says cryptically, "but I can't be open about

it."


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