From The Archive: The Sequel To The Lightning's Success

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The Sequel To The Lightning's Success - Feb. 1, 2021 - By Ken Campbell 

WHEN THE TAMPA BAY Lightning began the defense of their Stanley Cup championship in January – yeah, that still sounds super weird, doesn’t it? – they didn’t hold a banner-raising ceremony so much as a banner-revealing ceremony. The way they figure, it just doesn’t seem right to elevate it all the way up to the rafters of the Amalie Arena until 19,092 of their best friends are there to share the moment with them. Instead, they put it a little less than halfway up on the left side of the zone that the Lightning attack in Periods 1 and 3, so when they’re driving the net, there’s a good chance the words “2019-20 Stanley Cup Champions” will appear somewhere in their line of vision. It’s a good reminder. And if the Lightning are waiting until a full house of fans can return before they raise the banner fully, the team will probably have to wait until next season, which gives them the opportunity to make it one of those 2-for-1 deals. That’d be sweet.

I KNOW WHAT TYPE OF PLAYER I AM AND I KNOW WHAT I CAN BRING TO THE ICE AND TO THIS TEAM– Steven Stamkos

It would also make Tampa Bay sports fans a pretty spoiled bunch. In addition to the Lightning winning the Stanley Cup, Tom Brady took his talents to middle Florida and brought a team that hadn’t made the NFL playoffs in 13 years to the Super Bowl. The Tampa Bay Rays were one controversial managing decision away from forcing Game 7 in the World Series. Even the local soccer team, the Rowdies, made it to the final of the United Soccer League, but they couldn’t play the championship match because several players and staff tested positive for COVID-19 the day before the game. That’s a lot of winning. It’s not at Los Angeles or Boston levels, but it’s pretty darn good.

Not to diminish the accomplishments of the players on Tampa Bay’s other teams, but you had to feel pretty good for one Steven Stamkos. After all, Tom Brady, Randy Arozarena and Brandon Lowe have been around for, what, all of 10 minutes? (All right, Lowe has maybe been around for 20.) But nobody has been in town for as long and seen as many ups and downs as the Lightning captain. Nobody has been as individually brilliant nor, until the 2020 bubble playoffs, had as little to show for it. And none had provided the moment that Stamkos did for the Lightning last fall.

And none of them entered this season in the same, well, unique position Stamkos did with the Lightning. First, there was trade talk he had to deal with over the summer, owing mostly to the fact he has four years remaining on a deal that carries an $8.5-million cap hit.

It never got to the point where management asked him to waive his no-move clause, which he wouldn’t have done anyway, but to hear that the face of the franchise was left off an untouchables list had to hurt a little. And when you win a Cup essentially without a guy, with the exception of one series-altering play that will go down in history as one of the most memorable goals of the Stanley Cup final, maybe you can muddle along without him. “There are going to be people talking and speculating and all those sorts of things,” Stamkos said, “especially in a year where we had the pandemic and the cap was flat and everyone knew we were going to have some difficulties trying to navigate that. As I told them, I have a contract with a full no-move clause, and I intend to stay here and play here until that contract ends.”

But then you lose your best offensive player for the next regular season and, wait a minute, you actually do need him. Badly. So in the 2020-21 season, Stamkos has in some ways become the Lightning’s de facto offensive dynamo until Nikita Kucherov can return. Kucherov impacts the game in so many ways, and for the calendar year of 2020, there was not a better all-around and more productive hockey player in the world. “I’m not kidding myself, you can’t replace a guy like ‘Kuch,’” Stamkos said. “I know what type of player I am, and I know what I can bring to the ice and to this team. I just want to go out and execute.”

And so far, he’s doing pretty well, with four goals and nine points in seven games playing on the top line with Brayden Point and Ondrej Palat. “There have been some growing pains,” Point said. “Some timing things. There are things we need to clean up. It’s not perfect.”

But it is a little complicated. Stamkos still wears the ‘C’ in Tampa Bay, but leadership has been a work in progress. Two years ago, they hired a former Navy SEAL to help them in that regard. And then, after they were unceremoniously swept in the first round of the playoffs in 2019, the organization went to an outside consultant who took each player and coach through a Predictive Index to help them identify their leadership strengths. He helped them realize that in order to have success, the Lightning needed to remove some of that burden from Stamkos and spread it around to other players, so that’s what they did. He remains the face of the franchise, but in a kind of strange way, 13 years and two Rocket Richard Trophies after his Hall of Fame career began, Steven Stamkos might have something to prove.

IT CERTAINLY DIDN’T FEEL THE WAY YOU SCRIPT IT UP WHEN YOU’RE A LITTLE KID– Steven Stamkos

Perhaps the Lightning would have won the Stanley Cup without Stamkos skating a single shift anyway. But here’s the thing. After the four seconds it took for him to gather the puck in the neutral zone, beat Dallas defensemen Esa Lindell along the boards and fire a shot past Stars goalie Anton Khudobin to put the Lightning up 2-0 in an eventual 5-2 victory in Game 3, there was no way they were going to lose.

In that four seconds of brilliance, the narrative of the entire Stanley Cup final changed. To that point in the series, the underlying feel-good story centered around Stars coach Rick Bowness and how an NHL lifer on his last chance had the Stars on the verge of winning a championship. It immediately shifted to Stamkos and entrenched him in the annals of the game’s history.

For Stamkos, the goal represented a triumph of all the work he put in to prepare to play those five shifts and score. And it guaranteed that when he lifted the Stanley Cup over his head in an empty arena in Edmonton five nights later, Stamkos could take comfort in the fact he wasn’t just a playoff passenger, that he actually, physically, tangibly, did something to help his team win.

It’s almost as though people had forgotten what Stamkos did before he was forced out of the lineup in late February, the 15-game point streak during which he scored 12 goals and 22 points. Stamkos hadn’t played in the seven months before he scored that goal and would not play for another four months after he scored it. He could never have known at the time that the right side of his abdominal core was going to tear just months after the left had been surgically repaired, so it wasn’t as though he was pressing to get into the lineup so that when he looked back he could say he was more than just a bubble cheerleader. Was it? “It’s a tough question, and it’s a great question,” Stamkos said, “because I don’t really know how I would have felt otherwise. I knew I wanted to give myself a chance. There was never a thought in my mind that I wasn’t going to at least try to play, and I came into that game thinking I was going to play the rest of the series. So who knows how I would have felt? It certainly didn’t feel the way you script it up when you’re a little kid.”

It says in the good book, “Many are the plans in a man’s heart, but it is the Lord’s purpose that prevails.” That has since been shortened to, “Man plans, God laughs.” If the pandemic has taught us anything, it’s that the best-laid projections can amount to a whole lot of nothing.

When the Lightning signed Stamkos to his eight-year deal in the summer of 2016, they did so thinking the salary cap would continue to expand and that he would lead this talented group to multiple Stanley Cups. The latter might still happen, but Stamkos is not the lone alpha male in this bunch. The former? Well, that possibility has been shot to heck, and the Lightning continue to teeter on the brink of salary-cap hell, with a major reckoning seemingly always around the corner. Which is why the trade rumors took root in the summer. If the Lightning do win more Cups, Stamkos will be there, and he’ll be wearing the ‘C.’ But as more on-ice heavy lifting shifts to players such as Point, Victor Hedman and Andrei Vasilevskiy, and the leadership is spread among a veteran core that now has a championship pedigree, it’s safe to say that it hasn’t gone exactly as planned. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be really good.

When he’s been healthy, Stamkos has been remarkably productive. Over the past three seasons, he sits in the top 15 in the NHL both in points and points per game. He’s two years removed from scoring 45 goals and a career-high 98 points, but where he has really made strides is in distributing the puck and winning faceoffs. When Stamkos was scoring 60 goals and winning Rocket Richard Trophies, he had a shoot-first mentality, although he’s never been a shot-volume kind of player. Since entering the league in 2008-09, he has taken 2,520 shots, which doesn’t even put him in the top 15 in the NHL in that category. But get this. Among the 500 active NHL players with the most shots since Stamkos came into the league, only two have a better shooting percentage than Stamkos’ 16.9. Care to guess who? It just happens to be Point (17.2 percent on just 692 shots), and Edmonton’s Leon Draisaitl (17.0 percent on 1,031 shots).

Stamkos is on pace for about 260 shots projected over an 82-game season, which isn’t quite the number he was taking when he was battling Alex Ovechkin for goal-scoring titles, but it’s not that far off. But the same way he has deferred to others as they take more prominent leadership roles, an older and more seasoned Stamkos is just as likely to distribute the puck to a teammate as he is to shoot it. “I think my playmaking and passing have always kind of been a little under the radar,” Stamkos said. “So I’ve never been a guy who shoots just for the heck of shooting. I’m more selective with my shots, but shooting the puck, especially when I have a prime scoring chance, is something I want to continue to do. I actually feel like I’ve passed up a few, even in the small number of games we’ve played.”

And even though he has shuttled between left wing and center the past couple seasons, Stamkos has become one of the league’s better faceoff men. And like his shooting, that might also be a function of the fact there’s not a high volume. His union with Point gives the Lightning a premier faceoff man in Stamkos, combined with a player who can also take draws and plays an elite 200-foot game in Point. The two of them were basically splitting faceoffs at the beginning of the season, with Stamkos taking his cue from Point. Again, another example of Stamkos not needing to be the focal point in order for the Lightning to be successful. “In terms of me and Pointer, obviously he’s the center on that line,” Stamkos said. “But I tell him, ‘Anytime you want me to take the draw, you let me know if you’re not going well, or even if you want me to take all of them. Because I’ve been pretty successful the last couple of years, you let me know.’ And if I get rolling in a game, I’ll just tell him, ‘Hey, I’m feeling good, I’ll just keep taking the draws.’ You know he’s going to be the guy playing down low in the defensive zone and that type of thing, but if he ever wants me to take one or 20 draws, I’m ready.”

In the two weeks leading up to the Super Bowl, Stamkos read somewhere that, at this point in their careers, Tom Brady has a better chance of being in a Super Bowl than Steph Curry has of hitting a three-point shot. And he’s right. The career statistics for both players bear that out. “I mean, that’s ridiculous, right?” Stamkos said.

Yeah, it is. In his first 12 seasons in the NHL, Stamkos had been to the Stanley Cup final twice, compared to five times when his team didn’t even make the playoffs. So we’re all going to agree that winning a Stanley Cup is more difficult that winning a Super Bowl, right? Add to that the stress and monotony of a two-month bubble and the task is all the more difficult.

The Lighting and Stamkos may face the same challenge this summer, but Stamkos plans on being much more than simply an inspiration this time around. He has worked hard to get his body ready, and he feels better than he has in years. “You watch a player like Steven, and we’ve been together a long time, and I’ve seen this,” said Lightning coach Jon Cooper. “The physical pain aside, it’s the mental grind, and you’ve got to hand it to him for sticking it out and battling through everything he’s had to in order to get back in the game. When he’s worked so hard to get there, you want to see him have success when he comes back. You don’t want to see him struggle.”

He wasn’t struggling early in the season, nor were the Lightning. Nobody knows what’s going to happen in the NHL the next few years. Will the Lightning get crushed under the weight of their stars’ contracts, or will they replicate the Chicago Blackhawks, Los Angeles Kings and Pittsburgh Penguins and win multiple Cups?

They have the talent to do the latter, and for the next four seasons, they’ll have Stamkos, too. He’s made that clear. “It’s hard enough to win one,” he said. “It’s truly amazing what those teams were able to do. But once you win one, you know you can do it, you know the style of play and how hard it was to get there and what you need to be successful. And that’s the goal here. I mean, you can’t get ahead of yourself, but we believe we can win again. And that’s the goal for sure.”