Meet your 2021 (and 2022) Stanley Cup champions
The Tampa Bay Lightning face an off-season of upheaval, but their core puts them in a great position to win their third straight Stanley Cup and become a true dynasty
During the on-ice celebrations following his team’s Stanley Cup triumph, Alex Killorn of the Tampa Bay Lightning revealed to Hockey Night in Canada that he broke his left fibula blocking a shot in Game 1, which was followed by a surgical procedure in which a steel rod was inserted in his leg. To which one Twitter observer opined, “So Tampa has their first candidate to place on LTIR next year…”
Now that’s funny. (A stick tap to @Andy_Gags for the comedy gold and for the suggestion to Lightning GM Julien BriseBois. After all, $4.45 million is a significant cap hit and it’s not as though the Lightning haven’t done this before. Tampa took advantage of a massive loophole in the collective bargaining with playoff scoring champion Nikita Kucherov, so maybe it will take a really, really long time for Killorn to get into game shape. We’re kidding. Maybe.)
If there’s anyone who can pull something like that off, it’s your 2021 Stanley Cup champions. As the playoffs went on, Lightning coach Jon Cooper talked a lot about the legacy of this team, or at least this specific group of players. He compared this season to, “the last day of school,” in a year when the kids know that many of them will soon be going their own separate ways. Captain Steven Stamkos said that was an enormous motivator for the team this season, something they talked about and rallied around at several crucial points. And that will most certainly be the case with the 2020-21 Tampa Bay Lightning. There will be departures. There will be turnover. And some of it will be pretty significant.
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But here’s the thing. Even with that eventuality, the Lightning have what it takes to truly become a dynasty, to win another Stanley Cup in 2022-23. Would anyone be totally surprised if that happened? Absolutely not. Consider the following. Tampa has the best goalie in the world in Andrei Vasilevskiy, at least according to Kucherov, who, inspired by Bud Light and champagne, made a vociferous case for Vasilevskiy as the league’s best goalie. And he’s right. Relative to age, Vasilevskiy is racking up accomplishments at the same rate as some of the greatest goaltenders to ever play the game.
“I was telling him every day, ‘Vasy, you’re the MVP, you’re the best player,’ “ Kucherov said. “And then they give it to whatever the guy is in Vegas (Marc-Andre Fleury). And then last year, they gave the Vezina to somebody else (Connor Hellebuyck). No. 1 bullsh--. No. 1 bullsh--. He keeps working, even though he’s getting robbed every year by the NHL not getting the Vezina. If he would play in a different market, he would take the Vezina year after year.”
But it doesn’t stop there with the Lightning. In fact, it doesn’t come close to stopping there. They have one of the best defensemen in the world in Victor Hedman. They have one of the most purely talented forwards in the world in Kucherov. They have one of the world’s best two-way players in Brayden Point. They have one of the NHL’s top coaches, the frontrunner to coach Canada’s Olympic team in 2022, and a GM who is bold, innovative and unafraid to use the CBA rules to his advantage. They have a deep, deep core of players who are still in the primes of their careers and under contract for a long time. And with their success, the Lightning will continue to persuade their current players to take hometown discounts and be a preferred destination for players who want a chance to win.
Edmonton Oilers GM Ken Holland, who knows a thing or two about what it takes to win a Stanley Cup, maintains that in a league with as much parity as the NHL, all an organization can do every year is strive to be among the legitimate Stanley Cup contenders. After that, it becomes a confluence of great timing, good health and an enormous amount of good luck. Well, the Lighting have put themselves into the contender category for the foreseeable future. We all talk about Stanley Cup windows and it’s very clear the window for the Lightning is still wide open.
“It’s so hard to win the Stanley Cup and if you do it two years in a row, you deserve to go down in history,” Stamkos said. “No matter what happens from here on out, this group is going to be etched in history forever and that’s pretty effin’ special. We won the Stanley Cup and we still have the Stanley Cup. That’s amazing.”
Difficult decisions loom for BriseBois. Depending on what happens in the expansion draft in two weeks, he may lose his entire third line. When their players are healthy, the Lightning are in a major salary cap crunch and they won’t be able to put $18 million in cap space on the sidelines for much of the season in 2021-22. As it stands today, they have 17 players signed and they’re already almost $4 million over the projected $81.5 million cap for next season. BriseBois will likely have to make a deal with the Seattle Kraken to take an expensive contract off his hands, giving away futures to help keep the team in the present.
And the tab for all those moves to keep the Lightning a contender will one day have to be paid. But that day is not today. And it probably won’t be tomorrow. This team is not going anywhere and it would not be a surprise to see them become the first three-time Stanley Cup winners in almost 40 years.
