Welcome to post-Cup purgatory, Tampa Bay. Take a seat next to Pittsburgh. It looks like Chicago left his coat on the chair, but you can throw it on the floor and make yourself comfortable. You might be here a while.
Look, no one should feel bad for the Lightning, who were just unceremoniously bounced in five games by their local rivals, the Florida Panthers, in the first round of the Stanley Cup Playoffs. The Lightning made three straight trips to the Stanley Cup Finals from 2020 to 2022, winning the first two. Add in an early warning salvo in the 2015 Finals, and Tampa Bay has maximized its window as well as one can hope for in the salary cap era. Just like the Blackhawks did. Just like the Penguins. Julien BriseBois, and Steve Yzerman before him, have been exactly the kind of general managers fans dream of in the hyper-conservative world of the NHL – someone willing to do anything, year after year, at any cost.
And now it’s costing them dearly. Just like Chicago. Just like Pittsburgh.
Win-now mode is not just about living in the present, it is also about sacrificing the future. And the Bolts have done a lot of that over the years, with varying degrees of success. Last year, they traded a first, second, third, fourth and fifth round pick for Tanner Jeannot, who scored eight goals in two seasons and appeared in just seven playoff games for the Bolts. . In 2022, they sent two first-round picks (along with young NHLers Taylor Raddysh and Boris Katchouk) to Chicago for Brandon Hagel. In 2021, they gave up a second round for cap maneuvering in the Marian Gaborik deal. In 2020, they gave up a first-rounder for Barclay Goodrow and another first-rounder (acquired from Vancouver in the JT Miller trade) for Blake Coleman.
No one complained then, and no one should complain now. Those last two deals worked out so well that Coleman became the namesake of a player brand — the third-line scorer every team dreams of at the deadline. Hagel is a top player with 56 goals over the past two seasons. Even this season, fighting for little more than a wild card spot, the Lightning went out and added Anthony Duclair and Matt Dumba. Jeannot hasn’t been what Tampa Bay hoped for, but hey, when the Lightning see someone they like, they’re going to get them. We have to respect that. You have to like it.
But ultimately, you will have to pay for it. Florida may not have an income tax, but the NHL has a big-time tax. Winning has a price.
Here’s where the Lightning stand as they consider the future of franchise icon and team captain Steven Stamkos as a 34-year-old unrestricted free agent. As expected, given all the futures they’ve sacrificed for the present, they have the fourth-worst prospect pool in the league, according to AthleticismIt’s Scott Wheeler. But they’ve also committed to so many long-term contracts that it will be years before they can complete a proper rebuild. They have three absolute superstars still at the top of their game: Nikita Kucherov (coming off an MVP-caliber regular season with a league-high 144 points), Brayden Point (97 goals over the last two seasons), and Victor Hedman (a black horse). candidate for the Norris Trophy this year). But they don’t have the talent depth or cap flexibility to build another championship team around those three.
They’re way too good to tank, not good enough to really compete. Sound familiar to you, Patrick Kane, Jonathan Toews and Duncan Keith? What about you, Sidney Crosby, Evgeni Malkin and Kris Letang?
Tampa Bay could experience the most difficult period CapFriendly Page in the league. Hagel is signed through 2032. Anthony Cirelli and Erik Cernak are signed through 2031. Point is locked through 2030, Nick Paul through 2029, Andrei Vasilevskiy through 2028, Kucherov through 2027 and Hedman through ‘in 2025.
Each of these contracts expires when the player reaches the age of 34. How old is Stamkos again?
We know what happens next; we’ve seen it before. BriseBois shoves a shard of a broken hockey stick into that window, desperately trying to keep it open as long as he can. Former Blackhawks general manager Stan Bowman spent years handing out first-round picks to win three titles, but then spent years rearranging deck chairs to plug holes in the roster and maximize the little space he had. He traded Niklas Hjalmarsson and Artemi Panarin for Connor Murphy and Brandon Saad in the name of cost certainty. As recently as 2021, six long years after his Blackhawks beat the Lightning in a gripping Stanley Cup Final, he added Seth Jones, Jake McCabe and Marc-Andre Fleury in a vain attempt to keep the Blackhawks relevant. It took five straight springs out of the playoffs before new general manager Kyle Davidson finally destroyed everything, cutting Kane, letting Toews walk and tanking naked for Connor Bedard.
Pittsburgh is still in the false hope phase. New general manager Kyle Dubas came in and doubled down on the aging but brilliant core, adding the aging but brilliant Erik Karlsson to the mix. But the Penguins missed the playoffs for the second straight season and remained locked into that core for the foreseeable future. It may take them even longer than the Blackhawks to emerge from the soft middle of the NHL.
Before them, the Los Angeles Kings have won one playoff game in seven seasons after winning the 2012 and 2014 championships. A decade after their last title, the Kings are just trying to climb back up the rankings, after a loss after a third elimination consecutive in the first round at the hands of the Edmonton Oilers.
And now here comes the Lightning. Considering that BriseBois has had to extend Stamkos since last July, it is very likely that the general manager will let his star go, despite three consecutive seasons with a point per game. That would free up $8-10 million in cap space, but it would also free up 40 goals and some 80 points per year. Yes, Tampa is Tampa. Yes, the Lightning have been pretty good this season. Yes, they had the fifth-best points percentage in the league over the final six weeks of the season as Vasilevskiy returned to his usual spectacular form. Yes, Tampa remains an attractive and tax-efficient destination for free agents. Yes, it would be foolish to completely rule out a team that has Vasilevskiy in goal, Kucherov and Point up front and Hedman at the back.
But it would be just as foolish to expect the Lightning to be better next season without Stamkos — and/or whoever they give up to get under the cap — as with him.
Even if BriseBois had more foresight than Bowman, Ron Hextall and Dubas, and wanted to rip off the band-aid and accelerate the transition to the next era of the franchise, whatever that might look like, what could he really do? The roster is not very malleable. He stood in a corner. With his talent and pedigree, Tampa Bay may be able to paddle against the tide and avoid the coming waterfall for another year or two, but make no mistake, this is the beginning of an inevitable decline. A match that no team can postpone forever. The Lightning are stuck somewhere between mediocre and pretty good, the NHL’s version of purgatory.
Boo-hoo, said the rest of the league. And rightly so. No team should feel sorry for the Lightning, and no Lightning fan would trade one of their banners for a few more years of competition. The Lightning did it the right way – they went at it, year after year – and were rewarded for it. Twice. Not all teams are this lucky.
But the bill is coming due. And paying is a pain, even though it’s definitely worth it.
(Lightning and Panthers top photo after Game 5: Eliot J. Schechter/NHLI via Getty Images)