Back to back for Bolts
It was a few days ago when Jon Cooper was asked what winning a second straight Stanley Cup would mean for a team that spent so long trying — and failing — to win just one.
According to the Tampa Bay Lightning head coach, “it becomes like a legacy thing.”
Win once and you are forever remembered as a champion. Win twice and you move into legendary status. Win twice in a row and you may as well start preparing your Hockey Hall of Fame speech.
“You talk about some of the great teams in a decade span, and you hope the Tampa Bay Lightning would be mentioned in that,” Cooper said. “You sit back and say, ‘Look what Chicago did, they won three in six (years). And look what L.A. did, and look what Pittsburgh did. Multiple Cups, it’s street cred for the guys, for the organization, it shows what ownership and management and everyone all the way down and all the hard work they do, and their values are paying off.”
Following a 1-0 win against the Montreal Canadiens in Game 5, in which rookie Ross Colton scored his first goal of the playoffs and Conn Smythe Trophy winner Andrei Vasilevskiy earned his fifth shutout, you can now officially add Tampa Bay’s name to that list.
It turns out that lightning can indeed strike twice. With the number of star players expected back on this modern-day dynasty, don’t be surprised if it strikes for a third time.
That’s how dominant the Lightning have been these past several years. In 2018-19, they tied the NHL record for wins in a season. Last year, they lost just six games in the bubble to win the COVID — er, Stanley — Cup. After defeating the Habs in five games, they did it again to become only the ninth team to repeat and cement its spot amongst some of the best of all time.
In the end, Montreal could not complete the comeback. That the Habs even managed to win once seemed like a major accomplishment. Really, they never had a chance. With a payroll that exceeded the limits of the salary cap by $18-million or something like that, no one did.
Tampa Bay, which beat Florida in six games, Carolina in five games, and the New York Islanders in seven games, won the first three games of the final by a combined score of 14-5, before granting their mayor’s wishes and dropped Game 4, so that they could come back and win on home soil.
“You can’t explain it. It’s out of this world,” said Victor Hedman, last year’s Conn Smythe Trophy winner. “Winning a Stanley Cup is one thing, but doing it in front of our fans, family means the world.
“We’ve been up and down obviously the last few years. It’s going to go down in the history books — this team, these players, forever together.”
Tampa Bay had it all: Goalscoring, goaltending, and a defence that was the envy of the league. The Lightning had the top five scorers in these playoffs, with Nikita Kucherov leading with 32 points and Brayden Point leading with 14 goals. They also had a goalie in Vasilevskiy who allowed just eight goals in the final and improved to 15-0 in playoff games following a loss over the past two years.
The scariest part of it is, all of them are coming back.
At times, it wasn’t fair. It certainly didn’t seem that way to Montreal, which came away looking overwhelmed and overmatched. What they should not have felt was embarrassed.
“We’ve got so many players that worked their entire career to get to this point. It’s a tough pill to swallow,” said Montreal’s Brendan Gallagher.
“There’s no team that is stronger than this group and the resiliency that we showed, it’s just a good team to be a part of.”
The Canadiens made it farther than anyone had expected or believed was possible. They had been a team of destiny, having come back from the dead in a first-round series to Toronto, before sweeping Winnipeg and upsetting Vegas to reach the final for the first time since 1993. That they couldn’t pull off the fairy tale ending was more a result of their opponent than their own play.
Tampa Bay was simply too good, too deep and too determined. More than that, they were just too darn methodical.
Game 5, which Tampa Bay’s mayor had wanted so that the team could win on home ice, was more of a grind than a victory lap.