Being the best can be the worst
Tampa’s first-round flop boosts the idea of a Presidents’ Trophy jinx
The night the Tampa Bay Lightning was officially presented the Presidents’ Trophy, the NHL’s award to the team with the best regular-season record, the Washington Capitals were in the building, waiting in the locker room during the ceremony. The Capitals had won it three times since 2010, so they knew to keep a safe distance from what’s a nice achievement on its own but toxic when it comes to winning the sport’s ultimate prize. As Tampa Bay won a whopping 62 games this season, lapping the field, Washington might have seen the Lightning’s unfortunate fate coming.
“Typically when things are going really well for you and you’re having a lot of success, at least from my experience, the longer that success was coming, the easier it was to forget how you created that success,” Capitals forward T.J. Oshie said a month ago.
It was eerily similar to what Lightning coach Jon Cooper said after the Columbus Blue Jackets completed their shocking first-round sweep of Tampa Bay on Tuesday night.
“In today’s game with the parity, it’s not unusual that an eight (seed) beats a one anymore,” Cooper told reporters in Columbus. “Everybody’s that close. In the end, we just couldn’t find our game. That’s it. It’d been with us all year, and for six days in April, we couldn’t find it.”
In the 32 years that the Presidents’ Trophy has been awarded, just eight teams that claimed it have gone on to win the Stanley Cup; the 2012-13 Chicago Blackhawks are the last team to pull it off, and that was the lockout-shortened season. The Capitals finished with the league’s best regular-season record in 2010 (first-round loss), 2016 (second-round loss) and 2017 (second-round loss) before winning a franchise-first Stanley Cup last year, when Nashville won the Presidents’ Trophy and then got eliminated in the second round. The playoffs have repeatedly proven that it’s about which team is playing best in the moment rather than which team is the best, and this historic exit — Tampa Bay is the first Presidents’ Trophy team to be swept in the first round — could have ripple effects for years to come with how clubs approach the regular season. “When you have the amount of points we had, it’s a blessing and a curse,” Cooper said. “You don’t play any really meaningful hockey for a long time, then all of a sudden you’ve got to amp it up. It’s not an excuse, it’s reality.”
It’s hard to argue the Lightning should have purposefully lost more games this season. But perhaps there really is something predictive, and negative, about enjoying so much success before the chase for the Stanley Cup really begins.
During the regular season, Tampa Bay had the NHL’s top power play, top penalty kill and scored the most goals per game. Nikita Kucherov put up a league-leading 128 points and Steven Stamkos and Brayden Point each had more than 90. Against Columbus, Kucherov tallied just two points with no goals in three games, suspended for Game 3 of the series after he boarded Columbus’s Markus Nutivaara late in Game 2. Stamkos had an abysmal minus-8 rating with just one goal and one assist, and Point scored one goal with no assists.
The Lightning had a 3-0 lead in the first contest, but then the Blue Jackets outscored Tampa Bay19-5 over the next11periods. Top defenceman Victor Hedman was out Games 3 and 4 due to an undisclosed injury.
“If you don’t accomplish your goal of winning it all, it’s a failure,” Stamkos told reporters. “We don’t care about what happened in the regular season.”