TAMPA — Jon Cooper barely had time to reacquaint himself with the Stanley Cup late Wednesday before he was asked whether the Lightning can become a dynasty team.
Winning back-to-back Cups in the salary cap era is a rare feat. The Lightning became just the second team to claim consecutive titles since the cap went into effect 15 years ago.
You’d have to go back nearly four decades to find the last dynasty team: The Islanders won four straight Cups from 1980-83.
The Oilers won four in five years starting in 1984. More recently, the Blackhawks claimed three in six years starting in 2010. But no team has won at least three straight Cups since those Islanders teams.
“I don’t want to sit here and think about next year quite yet,” said Cooper, flanked by his assistant coaches, after the Lightning beat the Canadiens in Game 5 of the Cup final at Amalie Arena to win the Cup. “Do we as management and ownership and everybody put a magical group together? Yes. Do we have a star power of players? There’s no doubt.”
Cooper will be the first to remind everyone how difficult it is to consistently win in the NHL. The Lightning have been one of the league’s top teams over the past seven years. From their Cup final loss to Chicago in 2015 to Game 7 Eastern Conference final losses to Pittsburgh (2016) and Washington (2018), and their first-round playoff exit in 2019 to Columbus in a sweep after a Presidents’ Trophy regular season — not to mention missing the playoffs in 2017 — they are familiar with the challenge.
“We were knocking at the door for so many years,” Cooper said “We went from new kids on the block to that in 2015, when it’s ‘These guys are so much fun to watch, they’re going to be back again,’ to all of a sudden it gets tilted and now we’re the team that can’t get it done to now you’re throwing the word dynasty around. And so that’s a huge wave of emotions in a seven-year, six-year span to go through, but this core went through it together.”
A championship culture has been built by Cooper, his staff and the team’s veteran leadership, and general manager Julien BriseBois has been savvy managing the cap since Steve Yzerman stepped down in September 2018.
Next season, the franchise cornerstones return — 2021 Conn Smythe winner Andrei Vasilevskiy, Nikita Kucherov, Brayden Point, Victor Hedman and Steven Stamkos — but those five alone will account for nearly half (49.8 percent) of the space in next season’s $81.5 million salary cap, according to salary website Cap Friendly.
But the Lightning knew the 2021 season would likely be the last this group as a whole played together.
They avoided cap problems this year by placing Kucherov on long-term injured reserve for the regular season after his offseason hip surgery and acquiring contracts of other injured players.
This offseason, they will lose players who choose free agency and in the draft for expansion Seattle, which begins play next season. But the Lightning also will have to make some difficult roster decisions.
“We know going forward with the salary cap world that this might be the last game that this particular group plays together,” Stamkos said after Game 5. “I can’t say how much that motivated us. We talked about it midway through the playoffs. We talked about it going into Game 5 of the Islanders (league semifinal) series.
“Let’s take advantage of this opportunity because it’s not very often you get this chance to play with a talented team like we had. And we just believed, and it’s so hard to win the Stanley Cup, and then you do it two years in a row, I mean, you deserve to go down in history.”
Two-thirds of the Lightning’s gritty third line, the unit that might have been Tampa Bay’s best line in the postseason, can be unrestricted free agents when the market opens July 28. Blake Coleman ($1.8 million this year) and Barclay Goodrow ($925,000) came to the Lightning at last year’s deadline as tremendous bargains, and they are in line for significant raises after shining in the playoff spotlight. This year’s chief trade acquisition, defenseman David Savard, also can be a free agent.
In the July 21 expansion draft, the Lightning will be able to protect seven forwards, three defensemen and a goaltender, or eight skaters regardless of position and one goaltender, so some key veterans could be left unprotected.
Ultimately, the Lightning’s biggest challenge is the cap. They can’t expect to essentially write off nearly $18 million again. Taking away their potential free agents, they’re still already roughly $3.5 million over the cap for next season. And that’s before re-signing potential restricted free agents such as Ross Colton and Alex Barre-Boulet, who are coming out of their entry-level contracts.
“It’s so hard to win in this league,” Cooper said. “You’ve heard me say this until I’m blue in the face. But this a special, special, special group, and who knows, I guess we’ll see if we can three-peat.”
Contact Eduardo A. Encina at eencina@tampabay.com. Follow @EddieintheYard.
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