There were some stick taps to go around the Florida Panthers locker room on Wednesday night.
That’s because Panthers defenseman Dmitry Kulikov and Cats Head Coach Paul Maurice reached some fairly significant milestones in their respective NHL careers.
For Kulikov, he was playing career game number 1,000.
Maurice was coaching his 1,900th game in the NHL.
Those are some big numbers.
Speaking about the accomplishment, Kulikov was modest while almost downplaying feat.
“It feels good,” he said with a grin. “I don’t know what else to tell you. It’s just another game this season.”
Kulikov was drafted by Florida in the first round all the way back in 2009. He played his first 460 NHL games with the Panthers, enjoying seven seasons in Sunrise before spending the following seven playing for seven different teams.
The longest he spent with any team other than Florida was the Winnipeg Jets, where he was coached by Maurice.
“In the culture of our sport, 1,000 games is a huge, huge number,” Maurice said. “There is just not a lot of people that get to it.”
As for his own milestone, Maurice wasn’t very interested in speaking about coaching 1,900 games, despite being only the second person to ever achieve that mark.
He wanted to keep the attention on his player.
“It’s not worth talking about,” Maurice said. “When a guy gets 1,000 games, he should be the only person we talk about here today.”
There is another milestone that is nearing for the veteran bench boss.
Maurice’s next victory will be the 900th of his career, something only three other people have done.
Considering he’s still only 58 years old (he turned 58 on Thursday), there could be a long runway of career left for Maurice, depending how much he feels he has left in the tank.
Time will tell.
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