BUBBLE DOESN’T SPOIL STANLEY CUP CELEBRATION
Tampa Bay outlasts Dallas in six games
Tampa Bay caps the most unusual NHL postseason in history with a Game 6 victory over Dallas to win the championship.
EDMONTON, Alberta — The joyful yells from the bench could be heard in the empty arena in the final seconds and the roar from players when Commissioner Gary Bettman called for Steven Stamkos to accept the Stanley Cup echoed even louder.
The triumph of winning the NHL championship in a bubble was certainly no less sweet for the Tampa Bay Lightning.
Brayden Point scored his playoff-best 14th goal and the Lightning beat the Dallas Stars 2-0 in Game 6 on Monday night to finish off the most unusual NHL postseason in history, staged nearly entirely in quarantine because of the pandemic.
The clock hitting zeros with no fans in attendance set off acelebration for ateam that endured years of playoff heartbreak and two months in isolation — and their fans outside Amalie Arena in Tampa celebrated right along with them.
“It takes a lot to be in a bubblefor80daysorwhatever long it was,” said defenseman Victor Hedman, who won the Conn Smythe Trophy as playoff MVP. “But it’s all worth it now. We’re coming home with the Cup.”
Before giving that trophy to Hedman, Bettman gave all the players credit for enduring a quarantine largely on their own for so long.
“To be in this place at this time under these circumstances is remarkable and frankly overwhelming,” Bettman said. “Frankly, all of the players who participated should feel like MVPs.”
Goals from Point and Blake Coleman and a 22-save shutout by Andrei Vasilevskiy in Game 6 were enough to power the Lightning to their second championship after winning it in 2004. That one came just ahead of a lockout that wiped out anentire season andsimilar uncertainty hangs in the air now because of the coronavirus.
Questions about the future were put off for a celebration by the Lightning and by the NHL, the first of the four major North American professional sports leagues to crown a champion since the start of the pandemic.
Tampa Bay’s core group closed out the final with an almost poetic display of what got the Lightning to this point over the past several years and months. Point’s goal came with assists from longtime standouts Nikita Kucherov and Hedman, key addition Coleman scored on an odd-man rush in the second and Vasilevskiy did his job on a relatively slow night in net.
Veteran defense man Bra ydon Co burn was the first to get the Cup after Stamkos and H ed man, even though he played just three games in the postseason. He played 964 regular-season and 137 playoff games to get to this point, losing in the final twice before.
“The beauty of our team is everyone was chipping in,” Point said. “We got contributions from anyone and everyone at different times, and that’s what makes this win so special.”
It was more of a coronation than a challenge as the dominant Lightning outshot the Stars 29-22 and looked like the powerhouse they’ve been for much of the past decade.
Tampa Bay’s power play turned the series around after Dallas won the opener. Point’s goal made it 7 for 16 over the past five games to decimate the Stars, whowere undone by their lack of discipline and couldn’t get enough “Dobby” magic from goaltender Anton Khudobin.
“There is no feelings right now,” Khudobin said. “Just empty, you know. We battled hard, especially with this situation, it’s not easy to stay without families for two months and stuff like that.”
TheStars simply ran out of gas after injuries piled up.
“I couldn’t ask more from our players,” said coach Rick Bowness, an assistant for Tampa Bay for five years who waspart of their 2015 run that fell short in the final.
The league and players’ union worked for nearly four months to iron out where, how and when to play so 2020 wouldn’t join 1919 and 2004 as a year in which the Cup wasn’t awarded. The plan they came up with was unusual. Like the NBA, it called for walling off teams from the public for months on end. Unlike the NBA, it called for doing it in twospots — Toronto and Edmonton, while the U.S. grappled with spiking coronavirus cases in too many places for NHL leadership to feel comfortable.
In all, the NHL played 130 games in a bubble, 25 of them going into overtime, before the final horn set off a celebration by Tampa Bay that simply had to do with no fans in the stands, and few loved ones allowed on the ice to share the moment. Unable to hug them, players embraced each other and took out their phones to call and video chat with those who couldn’t be there.
“Wewerein the bubble for this many days away from our friends and family, our support systems,” Stamkos said. “Welove each and every person that has helped us and allowed us to come here and accomplish our dream.”