NHL coach still hoping for playoffs
As the winningest coach in the history of the Tampa Bay Lightning, Jon Cooper has proof of that success resting on a shelf behind his desk at home in Tampa.
There stand miniature replicas of the President’s Cup the Lightning won as regular season champions last season and the Prince of Wales Trophy the Bolts claimed in his second full season in 2015, the year they lost to Chicago in the NHL final. The one that’s missing is the Stanley Cup.
This might have been the year Cooper reached hockey’s his ultimate achievement and nobody’s saying for sure that dream is dead, but for the real contenders for the crown the hour is getting late to restart to what might be a lost season.
For Cooper and the Lightning, it all came to a screeching halt on Friday, March 13, when the NHL paused its season due to the pandemic. That sudden stop and the empty feeling of unfinished business felt eerily like a year ago when the Lightning, on the heels of a record 62-win season, were dealt s stunning first-round playoff sweep by the Columbus Blue Jackets.
“The feeling when we lost out and the feeling in the days after the season got paused, there were definitely some similarities,” said Cooper. “One day you’re going to work to play the Philadelphia Flyers and the next thing you know you’re sent home, the season’s on pause and then everybody can’t be around each other. Ýou’re just knocked right out of your routine. This is different in the sense that there’s just zero answers of what’s going to happen. There’s still that hope we’ll get to play.”
With 12 games still left on the schedule, Tampa (43-21-6) is tied with Colorado for third overall in the NHL, eight points behind the Atlantic Division-leading Boston Bruins. Cooper knows how hard it is to remain competitive in the league and how easy it is to fall, as last year’s playoffs proved when seven of the top 10 teams were wiped out in the opening round.
“It’s pretty easy to get the guys focused when you go out like that,” Cooper said. “I think the guys came in with the right mindset, of wanting to improve on what we did last year, not necessarily saying we had to set all these records as we did in the regular season but make ourselves a better playoff-ready team.”
Part of that was a commitment to better team defence and protecting leads, which led to a team-record 11-game winning streak in January-February.
“A lot of times last year we played the game to outscore teams and had to rely on our goalie to bail us out in games where this year there’s been a lot of games where we just outdefended teams,” said Cooper.
Cooper says the Lightning are fortunate in the fact almost all of the players live in the Tampa area, where they can continue the same outdoor conditioning regimens the follow throughout the winter and prepare for the day when hockey eventually resumes. Very few teams have that advantage and the players are now time zones apart from each other.
“They can’t use the arena facility so they have makeshift gyms and it’s probably the most strenuous on the strength coaches, because they’re the ones who have to try to keep these guys in relatively good shape,” said Cooper.
Cooper’s NHL career started the day he was called up to Tampa from Syracuse to replace Guy Boucher with a month left in the 2012-13 season, having won championships at every level he’d coached (NAHL, USHL, AHL) since making a career switch from lawyer to hockey coach.
“When you first get in the league, you’re in survival mode,” he said. “You’re hoping what you’ve learned on your way up to the NHL, you just stay with those principles, but there’s so much so going on and you’re just trying to keep your head out of the water. Fortunately for me I got to come up for those 14 or 15 games at the end of the year and go through the summer and prepare, and that was a big help to me.”
Cooper and his wife Jessie have three kids – 11-year-old twin daughters Julia and Josephine and a nine-year-old son, Jonny. His daughters are competitive swimmers, just like Cooper was when he raced for the Prince George Barracudas Swim Club.
“I was right into it, I did that until I was 13 or 14, until lacrosse and hockey starting taking over,” said Cooper.
Jonny played hockey this season for the Tampa Bay Lightning squirt A team, coached by former Lightning players Vinny Lecavailer and Dan Girardi, both of whom have sons on the team. In the Florida state final in Orlando March 1they beat the Florida Panthers 3-2 in overtime. Jonny scored the winner and Cooper was there in the stands watching what he considers the most stressful game of his 52-year-old life.
“I remember being in the Stanley Cup final, coaching it, and I was more nervous in that overtime game watching my son than I’d been at any time coaching in a game myself,” he said. “You have conflicted emotions because you don’t have anything to do with it. At least as a coach you can put out different lines or use different tactics but you have none of that. He’s family and your blood and you’re just cheering for them to have success.”