from John Romano of the Tampa Bay Lightning,
Little by little, player by player, time has nibbled away at the heart of the Lightning’s back-to-back championship teams.
And the rest of the NHL has applauded.
There’s nothing malicious about that. It’s just the nature of sports. Everyone wants to win, and the Lightning have been buzzing around the throne a lot longer than most. It was inevitable that the salary cap and expansion drafts would eventually take a toll.
And so now fans in New Jersey are cheering for Ondrej Palat in the playoffs.
And Yanni Gourde in Seattle. And Carter Verhaeghe in Florida. And Luke Schenn in Toronto.
The Lightning, meanwhile, are looking at a post-bully role in the NHL.
General manager Julien BriseBois said Tuesday morning that 2023 was a missed opportunity for Tampa Bay. The Lightning, he said, had all the ingredients needed to win a Stanley Cup, but just came up short. And he thinks the Lightning will still be Cup contenders in 2024 and will proceed accordingly this offseason.
All that sounds accurate, but it’s not the entire story.
You mean that a hard cap salary cap makes it impossible to have a dynasty over the course of a decade anymore. Pittsburgh was the last team to break this theory...and their dominance can be traced back to their woeful days of missing the playoffs in the mid 2000's plus draft luck-- lockout and otherwise (when they got Fluery, Malkin, Crosby, and Letang plus a little luck in the 2013 draft getting Guentzel and Jarry).
That there's no longer a pipeline of top prospects to replace those TB lost to UFA--where teams not up against the cap outbid the Cup winner for their players: should be surprising to no one.
And yet this writer is just figuring this out?
Just wait until he sees what happens after doling out these long term contracts with no trade clauses (to try to keep cap hits down) and the players start really aging. Like say Ken Holland and the Wings circa 2011 (re-signing Kronwall for 7 yrs @4.75M, Errorsson for 3 yrs @3.25M AAV, Ian White for 2 yrs @2.88M AAV, Nyquist's Bridge deal, Mrazek's Bridge deal...).
The hard cap is doing what it is supposed to be doing. But at least these bottom feeders had a chance. The real problem is that NHL had a maddening draft lottery for a number of years that had constant winners and losers. That changed when they updated it--but the damage to some teams was already done.
The Wings problem is that getting that 2nd/3rd/4th/5th/6th best player (as opposed to actual pick order):
(2018 #1 was Andrei Svechnikov, #2 was Brady Tkachuk, #3 Quinn Hughes, #4 Rasmus Dahlin)
(2019 #1 was Hughes, #2 and #3 are debatable Cozens, Zegras, Seider, Boldy, or Caufield)
(2020 #1 was Stutzle, #2 is either Raymond or Dawson Mercer with d-man like Jake Sanderson known to take more time to develop coming on strong)
(2021 #1 was Matty Beniers, #2 cases made for McTavish, Wyatt Johnson, Power, Hughes. With a special shout out to Wings draft slot Aatu Raty and the failed Leddy deal.)
meant the Wings rebuild had a ceiling on how high it could rise. In other words, they never got that generational talent/NHL points leader that could carry the team.
Pittsburgh (Crosby)/Washington (Ovie)/Tampa (Stamkos)/Edmonton (McDavid)/Toronto (Matthews) all got these guys.
And all will continue to be rewarded until that hard cap causes the team to crash. So unless Detroit hits on that 5% or less chance in the 2023 NHL Draft lottery--buckle up it's going to continue to be a rough next 3 years. And even then not all "generational talents" produce Cups....hello Eric Lindros, McDavid, and Matthews.
They also just looked really damn tired.
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