Lightning look for playoff return

TAMPA — When the Stanley Cup playoffs began in the spring without his Lightning, owner Jeff Vinik still watched from his Palma Ceia mansion. It stung.

“It’s hard, because you’d say, ‘We’re better than them,’” Vinik said. “We should have been there.’”

Coach Jon Cooper wanted to figure out why the Lightning wasn’t. He challenged his staff a week after the season ended. It was time for frank self-assessment. What were we missing? Did we do enough?

Then came school.

Cooper assigned each member of his staff a playoff series to study; Cooper took two. What could they learn? What did the playoff teams summer do better?

It wasn’t long ago that the rest of the league was playing catchup with the Lightning. Tampa Bay used a stunning blend of speed and skill to reach the Stanley Cup final in 2015, then Game 7 of the Eastern final the next year.

The fall was steep — and humbling.

“I think when I first came in [2013], we kind of changed the make of our team,” Cooper said. “We were really fast, we instilled a style of play, and I think we were really good at it.

“And I think other teams started doing the same thing and they got better at it than us. So it’s a matter of not reinventing yourself. You keep building on yourself. And that’s what we’re doing.”

So began an endless “look in the mirror” summer for the Lightning. What it did could go a long way in determining if its next summer is a shorter one.

From Day 1 of training camp, Cooper told the team it was “game on,” setting the tone from the fast-paced, first practice.

“Sometimes you need a little kick in the butt,” team captain Steven Stamkos said.

Anton Stralman lamented the slow start last season, which did it in. With a league-high 12 players, along with Cooper, at the September 2016 World Cup, something was off from the get-go.

The Lightning went 10-6-1 before team captain Stamkos went down for the season with a torn meniscus and had surgery, but the record was smoke and mirrors. By February, the Lightning had fallen to last in the conference.