Finally! Deserving Lightning Put Playoff Disappointment to Rest with Cup Win

Maybe it was a building full of reminders of a great hockey dynasty.

Or maybe it was the memory of last year, and a collapse labeled epic by anyone who witnessed it.

Regardless of reason, these Tampa Bay Lightning were a different team than in 2019.

Oh sure, the stars were still there. Playoff goals leader Brayden Point. All-world goaltender Andrei Vasilevskiy. And dynamic defensive catalyst Victor Hedman. All were full-time players last spring.

All left Nationwide Arena in disgust after the league’s best regular-season team shook hands with jubilant Columbus Blue Jackets players and wished them well after an embarrassing four-game sweep.

In that red-faced aftermath, they used phrases like “didn’t have an answer,” “didn’t see this coming” and “hard to pinpoint.”

Fast-forward to Monday night at Edmonton’s Rogers Place—exactly 531 days and about 2,000 miles past the debacle in central Ohio—and any one of that trio could have been cradling the Conn Smythe Trophy as playoff MVP that writers and media members awarded to Hedman.

And no one would have complained.

Because this Lightning team was all about the Stanley Cup.

The league’s second-southernmost franchise captured its second NHL championship in the league’s northernmost city—defeating the Dallas Stars, 2-0, to end their best-of-7 series in six games and complete an unprecedented postseason odyssey with a league-best 18-7 record.

This time around, the Stars were the ones skating away dejectedly.

And the phrases coming from the guys in blue and white, whose giddiness echoed throughout an otherwise silent barn as they surrounded the trophy before the official presentation, sounded more like “loss for words,’ “so many emotions” and “tough to describe.”

If you look at the standings—where Tampa Bay has won more games (158) and amassed more points (333) than any team in the last three regular seasons—it was expected.

But in terms of intangibles like mettle, grit and determination, and the willingness to take the lumps that come with the grisly playoff beards, these Lightning finally proved themselves. They became the first expansion-era team to win a Cup a season after a first-round sweep.

“We’re a different group," Hedman said.

"It's so worth it now. We’re coming home with the Cup. It means the world. Being a part of this organization for 11, 12 years. It's been a great ride. It's gonna take a few weeks or months to sink in.”

Perhaps it’s the geography talking, but fans of a certain vintage might shelve this team’s metamorphosis story alongside one that also occurred in northern Alberta a generation or so before.

Back then, it was a 106-point Oilers team—whose 1983 playoff roster boasted surnames like Gretzky, Messier, Kurri and Coffey—encountering a veteran New York Islanders unit and expecting to blow through them thanks to youthful enthusiasm and statistical star power.

Four games later the Islanders captured a fourth Stanley Cup, and Gretzky relayed a story of walking past the winning dressing room and dreading seeing the visitors in the throes of celebration. Instead, he saw a host of players draped in ice bags and exhaustion, and learned a lesson about the sacrifices winning demands.

A year later, the Oilers faced those same Islanders in the championship round, earned a gritty 1-0 decision in the series opener on Long Island and wound up taking the series—and the Cup—in five.

Hurdle cleared, they proceeded to win four of the next six titles as well, with the 1984-85 squad earning acclaim from fans in 2017 as the greatest NHL team of all time.

The symbolic hurdle came for the Lightning in round one of these playoffs, when they emerged from a round-robin tune-up series and exorcised the Columbus ghost in five competitive, but nevertheless decisive games. A five-game elimination of this year’s Presidents Trophy winners—the Boston Bruins—followed, and was succeeded by a spirited six-game ouster of the New York Islanders.

Along the way they won six of their eight overtime games, followed each of their seven losses with a win and did so almost entirely without the services of their "best" player, center Steven Stamkos, who scored 29 goals and 66 points across 57 games in the regular season, but saw less than three minutes of ice time in the entire postseason thanks to a lingering core muscle injury that left him "unfit to play."

Whenever adversity arrived, unlike last year, the mantra overcame the moribund.

Next man up. Next man in. Play for the name on the front, not the name on the back.

It's an anthem sung by the lunch-pail likes of Pat Maroon, Zach Bogosian and Kevin Shattenkirk, all of whom were acquired before or during the season to gird the team's heart and soul.

The payoff? A somber walk past the bench one year. A celebratory lap around the rink the next.

"It still doesn't feel real. I'm so proud of every single player on this team," Stamkos said. "I'm speechless. This is amazing. Everything we've gone through. The ups and downs. The doubters. We proved them all wrong."

Of course, given modern free agency and salary caps—and considering no team since 2000 has won more than three Cups—it’s unlikely that Tampa Bay will go full-on Oilers and hang four more banners between now and 2026. In fact, the Lightning’s cap situation is particularly precarious in that they have no fewer than 10 free agents to deal with and just more than $5 million in available space.

So keeping this team or a reasonable facsimile of it together in a compressed offseason is a task general manager/tinkering wizard Julien BriseBois will have to tend to as soon as locker room revelry subsides.

But you can’t blame them if they take an extra champagne sip or two in the meantime.

For this group in particular, it’s been a long time coming.