Why the Lightning will win the 2022 Stanley Cup
Let's get one thing straight: Tampa Bay is not the better team in this series. But the fumes from their previous titles are still very strong and the Lightning's hunger to win is even stronger
It’s a story that is almost 40 years old, but it bears repeating given the circumstances. Hockey lore has it that the Edmonton Oilers of the 1980s can identify the exact point in time when they became a championship team. And that was shortly after Game 4 of the 1983 Stanley Cup final, moments after they had been swept by the New York Islanders. “We walked by their locker room in the corridor and saw after they won that they were too beat up to really enjoy it,” Wayne Gretzky has said many times since then. “We were able to walk out of there pretty much Scot free.”
The Oilers had entered that final, “thinking we were invincible,” Gretzky said. They had gone 11-1 in the playoffs to that point, coming off a season in which they scored 424 goals, which to that point had been the most any team had ever scored in a season before. Gretzky had led the NHL in goals, assists and points and was joined by Mark Messier, Glenn Anderson and Jari Kurri in the 100-point club. In the New York Islanders, the Oilers were facing a fading champion who had scored 120 fewer goals than Edmonton that season, but allowed 89 fewer as well. The Islanders had endured a much more difficult path to the final and were no match for Edmonton when it came to producing offense.
But not only did the Islanders win the series, they took the Oilers to the woodshed and, as Gretzky suggested, took them to school. You can never discount a team that has absorbed the hard lessons of what it takes to win a championship and has done it multiple times, even a fading dynasty that isn’t as good as it once was. The Oilers became that team later in their own dynasty, winning a Stanley Cup for the final time in 1990 without Gretzky and Paul Coffey.
And that’s why I’m picking the Tampa Bay Lightning to win the Stanley Cup again in 2022 and become the first team since those Islanders to win three straight championships. On paper, it’s difficult to imagine the weary and battered Lightning are a match for the powerful Colorado Avalanche, who like the Oilers in 1983, have pretty much breezed through the first three rounds of the playoffs. The Lightning have trailed in two of the three series in which they’ve played and had to claw back from a 2-0 deficit to the New York Rangers in the Eastern Conference final. But there’s something to be said for resolve and destiny and all that other corny stuff that seems to matter in professional sports.
The bottom line is the Avalanche are a team that is elite in every aspect and it is learning how to win a championship. The Lightning, on the other hand, have been there and done that and got the T-shirt emblazoned with “No. 1 bullshit,” on it. If you were going to take the Lightning out, you had to do it early and, as usual, the Toronto Maple Leafs weren’t able to accomplish the one job they had in the playoffs. The Lightning might be chugging on fumes, but man, are those powerful fumes.
Here are five reasons why I think the Tampa Bay Lightning will win the Stanley Cup:
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