Sam Reinhart remembers the car rides. Sometimes it was two of them, him and his dad, or five of them, with his brothers and his mom. Sometimes two brothers sat in the back of the SUV, sometimes three, as they rode back from the sports that dominated so much of their lives.
"Those are some of my best memories," Reinhart said. "Just kind of breaking down the game, some positive, some not so positive. But the messaging was always clear, it was always constructive."
By that point, Paul Reinhart was no longer in the NHL or a professional hockey player, having retired at age 30 because of chronic back issues. Sam wouldn't be born until 1995, five years after his father's final NHL game.
So, no, Sam didn't have a childhood like that of Florida Panthers teammate Matthew Tkachuk, whose father Keith played until he was 13 years old. He wasn't in locker rooms, didn't watch his dad play, but had those car rides.
"He wasn't hard by any means," Reinhart said. "You see some of those hard hockey parents. My dad wasn't that at all. He was definitely passionate about it. We always said he would have loved to be a coach, but the time constraint was a big factor. He took that out on us, and we were beneficiaries of that. Those were great car rides."
For Sam Reinhart, 29, those core memories, the moments when he picked apart his game, when he learned lessons he would carry through his life, are still present now, when he is so far from them.
The rides home have turned into luxury buses and chartered planes, but those car trips are where he started to first see the game, to build the hockey intelligence that has gotten him to the NHL and beyond that has Panthers coach Paul Maurice calling him "one of the smartest players that I've ever coached," to where he is playing in the Stanley Cup Final for the third straight season, with Game 1 against the Edmonton Oilers at Rogers Place in Edmonton on Wednesday (8 p.m. ET; SN, CBC, TVAS, TNT, truTV, Max).
It's where Reinhart started to become the player with a skill set varied enough that he scored 57 goals last season and this year is a first-time finalist for the Selke Trophy given to the top defensive forward in the NHL.
"It's not like there was that much specific that was involved in the instruction," Paul Reinhart said, adding that Theresa Reinhart, a high-level athlete herself, was a key part of the debates.
"It was more that the boys -- all three of them -- were close enough in age. They were all good hockey players. They all had high IQs and so it was a combination of all of us always talking about various things, so they kind of came by it naturally."
While insisting he didn't want to diminish the impact of himself, of those conversations, Paul Reinhart said that the ultimate influence was "really up to the kids and the ability to and desire to want to learn and want to get better," but there's no question that the Reinhart boys took direction from each other. It started with oldest brother Max, a forward selected by the Calgary Flames in the third round (No. 64) of the 2010 NHL Draft, through Griffin, a defenseman and the No. 4 pick by the New York Islanders in the 2012 NHL Draft, to Sam, chosen No. 2 in the 2014 NHL Draft by the Buffalo Sabres.
"I would say that Sam very much had the benefit of older brothers going through the various process, various leagues, various conditions," Paul Reinhart said. "To Sam's credit, he was always observant and watched and learned from their experiences. And that's a credit to him because not everybody who sees what goes on before them actually takes instruction from that or takes the right lessons."
All three would go on to the NHL. Max played 23 games for the Flames, Griffin 37 for the Islanders and Edmonton Oilers.
Sam Reinhart has 619 points (294 goals, 325 assists) in 775 games for the Sabres and Panthers. He has 13 points (four goals, nine assists) in 15 games of the 2025 Stanley Cup Playoffs, including two assists in the Panthers' 5-3 win against the Carolina Hurricanes in Game 5 on May 28, which clinched their third straight trip to the Final. This after missing two games with an undisclosed injury.
He has become an invaluable part of the Panthers since the July 24, 2021, trade that sent him to Florida for goalie prospect Devon Levi and a first-round pick in the 2022 NHL Draft. It's where he has shown his hockey IQ, intelligence, ability to read and react not just on plays but in situations, a player who believes he plays his best the less video he's watched.
"There were some nights where the legs weren't quite there and he just adapted the way he played," Maurice said of Reinhart's season. "He didn't cover as much ice -- earlier reads, shift length. … He doesn't play the same game every night and where some guys will say, I just didn't have my A game and so I wasn't very good tonight, he'll just adapt and play a different style, a little more patient at times, just feeling it, lots of jump, very physical actually. But he can do that. He can be very effective in different styles."
It wasn't until Sam Reinhart was about 10 years old that Paul Reinhart started to understand the path his youngest son could be on. He took the kids in the summers to the hockey school run by his former Vancouver Canucks teammate, Stan Smyl, in British Columbia, helping out where he could.
"I was working on a couple of face-offs with him after the session and just the small moves and things he was doing," Paul Reinhart said. "I remember saying to him at 10 years old, Sam, there's nothing that anybody will ever be able to teach you about the game that you don't already know. Now it's just execution. Now it's just getting better at all the skills."
Those were the building blocks.
It was up to Sam to figure out the rest, to integrate the offense, defense and the innate hockey knowledge that was formed from his DNA, those debates in the car, years and years of practicing with and competing against two brothers equally driven in athletic endeavors that ran from hockey and baseball to tennis and golf.
They were a family that, like Paul put it, would "far sooner play sports than watch them," the family feeling most at home on a field or rink or pitch, a tight fivesome at golf, with their dog along for the rounds.
They helped form him.
"So much of what they call hockey IQ in my view or opinion is really all about spatial awareness more than it is about any intelligence," Paul Reinhart said. "And that's something that you either have or you don't have. I don't think you can manufacture that. You can maybe get better at it, but you can't generate that if you don't have it in the first place."
It was the way Paul approached his own game, never truly thinking about the method behind it until his sons were old enough to be coached, he went back to playing three-on-three hockey with some former teammates and forced himself to become a better teacher of the game.
He became that. The kids pushed each other.
Reinhart arrived in Buffalo possessing every skill that would later be more celebrated in Florida, from the goal-scoring prowess to the Selke-level defense.
Now, though, it's more visible, with the lights brighter and the games bigger.
"I think timing and situation, and opportunity is a big part of it," Sam Reinhart said. "You could sit here and say that I got put in a good opportunity and was able to succeed kind of later in my career, but I always look back and think of the work I put in when it wasn't quite going as well. ... It was a lot of hours put in, especially early in the career, that have kind of led to this."
That came from Paul Reinhart, at least in part. Though the message started as him encouraging his sons to play for the love of the game and the enjoyment of sports, at a certain age it changed. It was not that the game shouldn't be fun, but that the work ethic had to be there. He had to work, but he could enjoy that work. And it came from someone who knew exactly how hard it was to get where Sam Reinhart wanted to go.
"It might have been a different experience for 'Chucky,' let's just say, who kind of grew up around it," Reinhart said of Tkachuk having a dad in the NHL. "We were certainly around the game, but my dad was home at noon every day, picking us up, dropping us off. I almost got the other side of it, where I didn't know Dads really worked until I was a little bit [older]."
Paul Reinhart played 648 games for the Flames and Canucks, scoring 559 points (133 goals, 426 assists) as a defenseman. He made the playoffs in nine of his 11 seasons, reaching the Stanley Cup Final once, in 1986, when the Flames lost to the Montreal Canadiens in five games.
"He was around so much. I loved it," Sam Reinhart said. "I was certainly aware of [his career], I think as I started getting a little bit older, started to appreciate it more, and certainly I've seen a number of his games on ESPN Classics and various places. We always played so much growing up together, three on three, still do. It's certainly something that I've grown to appreciate more and more as I've gotten older."
Just like those car rides.
