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Goodness Greatness - Feb. 11, 2019 - By Ken Campbell 

THE COACH’S OFFICE IN Amalie Arena is just to the left of the tunnel that leads from the ice to the Tampa Bay Lightning’s dressing room. The guy who occupies it is Jon Cooper, who this year became the NHL’s longest-tenured active coach with the same team. When asked how many times he’s pulled a player into his office for a closed-door meeting between periods over his five-plus seasons, Cooper contemplates the question for a moment. Almost never, that’s how often. But last spring he did. You know what they say about desperate times, and things were looking dire for Cooper and the Lightning.

It was the first intermission of Game 2 in Tampa’s second-round playoff series against Boston last April. The Bruins’ top line of Patrice Bergeron, Brad Marchand and David Pastrnak (you might have heard these guys are pretty good) were making the Lightning’s unit of Brayden Point, Tyler Johnson and Ondrej Palat look the way they make a lot of opposing lines look – like a bunch of donkeys. Point jumped out to the early clubhouse lead by going minus-5 in Game 1, and on the fifth goal he looked as lost as Dorothy just after the hurricane blew through Kansas. Then with 1:30 remaining in the first period of Game 2, Point jumped onto the ice to replace Steven Stamkos just in time to watch Charlie McAvoy finish a three-way passing play that ended in his first career playoff goal. “He ate a s---ty minus,” is the way Cooper describes it. Four periods into the series, Point was minus-6 and he was wearing it like a scarlet letter, taking no solace in the fact that plus-minus has been exposed as a faulty stat by the analytics world.

I PUT HIM RIGHT UP THERE WITH MCDAVID IN TERMS OF HOW HE CREATES SPEED ON HIS CROSSOVERS– Steven Stamkos

So Cooper pulled Point into his office. He could see the frustration on Point’s face, but even more, he could see and sense doubt. This was Point’s first foray into big-boy playoff hockey, and things weren’t going well at all. Perhaps all those people who had been telling him since he was a kid that he was too small were finally going to be proven right. “I bring him into the office and I tell him, ‘I’m not pulling you off this matchup. You can do it. You’ve had some s---ty luck. But you know you can do this,’” Cooper said. “We talked it out, and he went out there and look at what happened.”

Point responded with three points in the second and third periods, and he wasn’t on the ice for another even-strength goal against for the rest of the series as the Lightning swept the next four games.

Those who know Point best weren’t surprised by the turn of events. Place a challenge in front of him and he will take it, then beat it, then exceed it. It’s been that way since his minor hockey days when he won the Esso Medal of Achievement as the most dedicated player for the Blackfoot Chiefs peewee team. When the Lightning told him to improve his skating and had him work with former Olympic skater turned skating coach Barbara Underhill – the woman who transformed John Tavares from plodding to powerful – Point took the hint and now goes stride for stride against the best players in the league. “I put him right up there with (Connor) McDavid in terms of how he creates speed on his crossovers,” Stamkos said. “His first three strides are explosive, and that gives him an edge on everyone. Then the skill set and the smarts take over. I think he’s one of the best centermen in the league.”

Holy smokes, that’s heady praise from a player who could say the same thing about himself. But Point has earned it in this, his third season in the NHL. While the Lightning were spending December and January running away with the league and Nikita Kucherov was snowbanking a pretty good case for both the scoring championship and Hart Trophy, Point was quietly becoming one of the world’s most effective two-way centers. On pace for 50 goals and 110 points through late January, he was making his own case for some individual hardware. Point was within striking distance of the Rocket Richard Trophy and will probably get some love for the Selke. And even though he’ll likely take a back seat to Kucherov, he’s been mentioned as a legitimate candidate for the Hart. About the only person he hasn’t impressed is himself. “I don’t think I’m the MVP of this team,” Point said. “I’m not even in the top five.”

Centering a unit with Johnson on the left side and Kucherov on the right, on what might be the smallest dominant line to come along in decades, Point accepts the responsibility of going up against top lines and not only keeping them off the scoresheet but contributing offensively himself. He has done a fair bit of damage on the power play, and having a shooting percentage of 23.6 hasn’t hurt his cause, but Point is contributing in all situations. Of his 22 assists at even strength, 18 were primary. Point’s line will never win a tug-of-war against any other in the NHL, but try getting the puck away from any of them. We often associate lines that can cycle the puck well with behemoths, but Point’s trio manages to keep control of the disc and cycle it around the offensive zone with speed and skill. “‘Kuch’ is the most talented player on that line by a lot, but he might be the most talented player in the league,” Cooper said. “But somebody drives ‘Kuch’ to play the game faster, and Point does that. And ‘Johnny’ can keep up. But Point, he drives lines, he’s the guy who drives it.’

Wow, more heady praise for a guy who honestly thinks he doesn’t deserve it. Humility and a quiet sense of purpose go hand in hockey glove with Point. He’s in a long-distance relationship with the same girl he started dating in his first year with the WHL’s Moose Jaw Warriors. His idea of a perfect night is to go back to his Tampa condo and spend time with his golden doodle, Hank, named in deference to Hank Williams, and play long-distance video games with his brothers.

Point grew up in Blackfoot, a hamlet in the east end of Calgary that’s predominantly working class. His father, Grant, graduated from high school and became a paver, and he now manages at Bow River Paving, where Brayden’s older brother Riley works as an estimator and his mother, Janice, is employed as a secretary. No silver spoons to be found anywhere, but lots of spade shovels. “We’re about as middle-class as you can get,” Grant said. “And Blackfoot is a real blue-collar community. We have 10 tow-truck drivers for every doctor.”

Brayden and his father golfed a dozen times with a couple from their golf club last summer, and when they asked what he did, Brayden told them he played hockey for a living. It wasn’t until late in the summer that the couple realized they were golfing with a 30-goal scorer in the best league in the world. “Someone must have said something to her because she finally came up to Brayden and said, ‘You said you played hockey, but you never told me you played in the NHL,’” Grant said. “He’s not a Chatty Cathy, that’s for sure. You could be with Brayden for days and never know he played in the NHL. He would never tell you that. It’s all inward with him. You watch him score a goal sometimes and he barely celebrates.”

Must have something do with him being so used to doing it. At every level he has played, Point has been an elite producer. He thinks the game at a superior level and has top-shelf hand and stick skills. And now that he has turned his skating from a weakness into a strength, he has an attractive and varied skill set. When the Lightning missed the playoffs after Point’s rookie season in 2016-17, Cooper took the job of coaching Canada’s team at the World Championship. He decided to put Point between Mitch Marner and Travis Konecny, thinking they might make a good fourth unit that would spend much of its time watching and learning from the bench. Marner finished second in scoring for Canada with 12 points, Konecny had eight assists and Point contributed four goals to a team that lost the gold-medal game in a shootout. “They were rock stars,” Cooper said. “They were our best line. The only line I never split up the whole tournament. Point and Marner were unreal together.”

HE WAS GOOD AT ALL, GREAT AT NOTHING. NOW HE’S BECOMING GREAT AT ALL AND GOOD AT NOTHING. THAT’S WHAT HE’S DOING– Jon Cooper

When Cooper saw Point at his first training camp, he wasn’t as underwhelmed as he was realistic. He saw a good little player who might have a chance to be a guy who went up and down from the minors to the NHL to fill in for injuries. At the very least, he could have been a good guy for Traktor Chelyabinsk, the KHL team that drafted him in the fifth round when he was a 17-year-old in 2013. “You’re like, ‘Yeah, he’s a good little player,’ but they’re a dime a dozen,” Cooper said. “I’m a true believer that if you’re an undersized player, you’d better be good at something, you’d better be the fastest skater, you’d better have the best shot, whatever it is. He was little and he was good at all, great at nothing. Now he’s becoming great at all and good at nothing. That’s what he’s doing.”

But there’s also a little more to this. Has anyone taken notice that Tampa Bay has had more success than any other team when it comes drafting and developing small players? According to the NHL rosters at the start of the season, the Lightning are the third-shortest team, averaging six feet and 0.7 inches. Their average weight is 196.9 pounds, and there are only eight teams lighter than that. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that 5-foot-9 Pat Verbeek, the Little Ball of Hate™ who scored 500 goals and 1,000 points in the NHL, is their assistant GM, or that 5-foot-10 Stacy Roest, who scored just 28 goals, is their director of player development. But Tampa Bay is having all kinds of good fortune taking advantage of the direction the league is going. At 5-foot-11 and 178 pounds, Kucherov is the giant of the group, and he’s joined by Point (listed generously at 5-foot-10, 166), Yanni Gourde (5-foot-9, 172) and Johnson (5-foot-8, 183). Gourde and Johnson were free agents, while Kucherov is a second-round pick and Point a third-rounder. And the Lightning might have another one in Alex Barre-Boulet, a 5-foot-9, 167-pounder who was signed as a free agent after he led the QMJHL in scoring as an overage player last season and is among the AHL’s leading rookie scorers this season. It really isn’t that complicated. The numbers are there for everyone to see.

After drafting defenseman Johnathan MacLeod 57th overall with their third pick in 2017, the Lightning tried to swing a deal to move up to take Point. The teams picking 58th through 78th turned them down until the Lightning traded a seventh-rounder to the Minnesota Wild to move up just one spot to select Point 79th. But it’s what they did with Point after they drafted him that has made most of the difference.

Two days later, Point was in a Lightning development camp. They then put Underhill on his file, even dispatching her to Moose Jaw to work with him on his skating. What organization does that for a third-rounder? Part of it was a lack of leg strength, but Underhill discovered early that much of what was holding Point back in his skating was his ankle flexion, meaning his foot naturally gravitated to pointing up to his shin instead of staying straightly aligned. She conditioned Point to concentrate on getting up more on the ball of his foot, where he would be able to get so much more push and power in his stride. “I just worked on it and worked out with her and I’m better at it,” Point said. “I’m still not great, I’m not perfect, but it’s something that helped me for sure. It’s exciting to see results, but still lots of work to do.”

There’s always a lot of work to do. Point could be better at winning faceoffs, but then again McDavid and Nathan MacKinnon will never be confused with Patrice Bergeron or Sidney Crosby at this point in their careers. And when a team like the Washington Capitals wins the Stanley Cup, there’s always the concern you’re not big enough or strong enough to compete in the playoffs when the game gets far more difficult. “Is this the part where I say you can’t hit what you can’t catch?” Cooper said.

Tampa Bay has been to the Eastern Conference final three of the past four years, including one trip to the Stanley Cup final in the season before Point arrived. And much is expected of this group. There isn’t a more dynamic team in the league, but that sometimes means you’re scoring your way out of jams when your weaknesses have been exposed. Point is part of the group that makes the Lightning so dangerous, and even though he’s being humble when he claims he’s not even among the team’s top five players, he knows he’s surrounded by players who take up a lot of oxygen. Stamkos is one of the greatest goal-scorers of his generation, Kucherov has established himself as one of the NHL’s most gifted offensive players, Victor Hedman is a perennial Norris Trophy candidate, and Andrei Vasilevskiy is a multiple Vezina winner in waiting. Kucherov and Stamkos were selected for the Atlantic Division team in the 2019 NHL All-Star Game, and Vasilevskiy was chosen as a replacement for Carey Price. At the very least, Point is having to take a spot in Tampa’s pecking order. But, to the surprise of no one, he’s perfectly fine doing so. “Those guys are great players, and they deserve all the credit they get,” said Point of his higher-profile teammates. “What they do in the games, it’s incredible. I’m just happy to be here, happy to be a part of it and chip in when I can.”

HOW MUCH IS HE WORTH?

Point is due a massive raise, but the Bolts don’t have much room. Is an offer sheet in the offing?

NO PLAYER WHO SPENDS all of 2018-19 in the NHL will have a lower base salary than Brayden Point. That’s because according to the league’s collective bargaining agreement, no player can make less than the minimum wage of $650,000, which is what Point will collect before performance bonuses. And even those amount to just $182,500, which is the kind of money that NHL superstars come across when they’re vacuuming their sofas or find in their coat pockets once they’ve taken them out of summer storage.

This will all change, in a big way, both for Point and an unprecedented number of young players this summer. The NHL made history when John Tavares, the best UFA in the history of the game, hit the open market last July. And it will do so again when the best crop of Group II free agents in league history come out of their entry-level contracts. And like Tavares, it has potential to cause a seismic effect on the landscape of the NHL.

Point is firmly entrenched in a murderer’s row of upcoming Group IIs that includes Auston Matthews, Patrik Laine, Mikko Rantanen, Mitch Marner, Sebastian Aho, Matthew Tkachuk, Brock Boeser and Kyle Connor. Of all those players, only Rantanen had more points than Point, and none had more goals.

So where exactly does that leave Point, a line driver who plays center and contributes at both ends of the ice? Good question. You could argue all those players are better than William Nylander, who signed a front-loaded six-year deal worth $45 million after sitting out the first two months of the season. Is he better than Jack Eichel, the captain and face of the Buffalo Sabres, who’s in the first of an eight-year deal worth $80 million? If Matthews leads the way with a yearly stipend of about $13 million and Marner falls in around $10 million, Point’s accomplishments through the first three years of his career suggest he’s right in that category. “I’ll just play this year out and we’ll see what happens after, I guess,” Point said. “I’m hopeful, but you never know in hockey. Just trying to focus on playing, and that’s where my head is at now. Just trying to focus on hockey games.”

Both Lightning GM Julien BriseBois and Point’s agent, Gerry Johannson, agreed early in the season to shelve contract talks until the summer. It’s a decision BriseBois may regret. With Steve Yzerman abruptly resigning as GM last September, BriseBois didn’t even have the opportunity to ink Point to an extension last summer, something that would have cost the Lightning much less than it will after this season. Complicating matters is the fact that the Lightning have just $6.4 million in cap space for a roster that will have just four NHL-caliber defensemen under contract. Of any team, the Lightning might be most primed to be the target of an offer sheet this summer, one that would force them to either match and strain their cap situation even further or lose Point.

It’s important to point out there hasn’t been an offer sheet tendered to a Group II free agent in almost six years. There are varying opinions on whether there will be some this summer, but if there aren’t with this class of players, the offer-sheet option in the CBA will have been rendered useless. All these great players could also trigger some paralysis in the marketplace, with agents waiting for the first player to sign and set the market before wading into their own deals.

Johannson doesn’t profess to have a crystal ball, but he’s keenly aware of the Lightning’s situation and the potential for offer sheets. In the summer of 2007, he negotiated an offer sheet with the Edmonton Oilers on a five-year, $21.3-million deal for Dustin Penner that prompted then-Anaheim Ducks GM Brian Burke to challenge his Oilers counterpart Kevin Lowe to a barn fight. It also triggered much of the fear we see about offer sheets and recriminations for signing them. “Things have changed in that people are talking about them more now,” Johannson said. “At one time it was kind of a skeleton in the closet, but now people are talking about them more openly. Team owners understand them better as a legitimate option that’s allowed under the CBA.” – KEN CAMPBELL