As the championship game in the 1995 Memorial Cup wound down, I recall trying to decide if I had just watched the best junior hockey team ever. In the final, the Kamloops Blazers destroyed a good Detroit Jr. Red Wings squad coached by a young prodigy named Paul Maurice, who caught a lot of people’s attention that year.
He was hired by the National Hockey League’s Hartford Whalers the following season as an assistant coach and was promoted to head coach 12 games into the schedule when Paul Holmgren got the axe. Maurice later moved with the team to Carolina, posting two stints as the franchise's bench boss (1995-2003 and 2008-12).