You’ve read the Tampa Bay Lightning season previews. Which were pretty much the same previews you read this time last year. Except for the part about Steven Stamkos. Is the window still open or is it closed? The state of hockey coverage circa 2024 is such that posing this question constitutes analysis. I mean, people actually get paid.
But you want more than that. You came here for the real questions and since somebody has to deliver, let’s get to at least six of them before the opening puck drops.
Can Jake Guentzel play right-handed?
I don’t know what you did all summer but I spent the months without hockey in a dark room trying to figure out who on earth is going to play on the Tampa Bay power play. Nikita Kucherov: Duh. Brayden Point: Why, yes, of course. Jake Guentzel: Not paying him $9 million for nothing. After that, no spot should be secure.
Specifically, there is the matter of filling the shoes of power-play specialist Stamkos, he of the obscene one-timer that came from, well, you know where it came from.
The 2023-2024 Lightning made the playoffs essentially for two reasons: first, because they employ Kucherov and, second, because they had the NHL’s best power play. Sure, the aim this season is to be better 5-on-5. But a significant drop-off on the power play wouldn’t be good. Stamkos took 19 such goals — and a constant threat that required teams to think about someone other than Kucherov — with him to the place where they wear yellow sweaters.
Reports so far suggest Guentzel will play down low. Thank goodness. The Nick Paul experiment was worth trying and I’m a fan generally but Paul never figured out what to do when the best passer in the world dished in his direction.
Presumably, we’ll see more movement. Even so, someone has to shoot from the area of the ice Stamkos used to call home. It won’t be Guentzel since, for all the hype about his arrival, one thing that prevents him from filling the void entirely is the fact that the sticks he walks into Amalie Arena with bend left.
Is Sheary the Irish word for lucky?
Conor Sheary got to play with Sidney Crosby. Conor Sheary got to play with Alex Ovechkin. Conor Sheary now plays with Nikita Kucherov.
Last season, Sheary, brought in to bolster Bolts scoring depth, played in 57 games and scored a measly 4 goals. Yet he maintains job security. He’s paid $2 million a year to play 10-11 minutes of hockey a night. Some guys have all the luck.
The top-heavy Lightning lineup desperately needs him — or someone like him — to exceed expectations in 2024-2025. Otherwise, they could be sellers at the trade deadline and, no doubt, Sheary would be shipped to Edmonton because why shouldn’t he get to play with Connor McDavid?
Is Andrei Vasilevskiy done?
Yes, right after I finish this post I will go to confession. And I’m not even Catholic. There are people who say with a straight face that Vasilevskiy is a Vezina Trophy candidate. In reality, his play last season was much closer to that of his journeyman backup than it was to Vezina-caliber.
I know what you’re thinking: His back!
Yeah, about that: Back injuries aren’t like Tommy John surgery for baseball pitchers where you stick a new one in and get back to better. His job description is to flop around on ice as super shifty men bear down on him at high speeds. Sure, Vasilevskiy played better the last third of last season. But there’s no guarantee the back won’t always be a thing.
More importantly, Vasilevskiy wasn’t a top-five goalie the year before his back injury. His play in the 2022-2023 playoff loss to Toronto was, to be polite, not stellar. The very question about whether the window to more Stanley Cups is still open is predicated on the notion that the 2024-2025 Vasilevskiy will be same or similar to the 2020-2021 Vasilevskiy and, while few would be happier than yours truly to see it, the logic that say it’s likely is a bit of a back-bender.
Who named Victor Hedman captain anyway?
People say, “Being a captain is not about skill.” Except when you are so clearly the most skilled player on your own team … yeah, it sorta is. Three-time Super Bowl-winning football coach Bill Walsh said it well: “Expertise is leadership.”
The Tampa Bay Lighting is and must be Nikita Kucherov’s team. Kucherov played on a line with a guy who scored 46 goals and yet Kucherov still had the most points on his team by a margin of 54. Fifty-four points is a good year for most guys. Nick Paul had 46 points last season and people thought that was pretty sweet.
Five guys in the history of hockey have 100 assists in a season. Only one of them is a winger. Is there any player in the organization who works harder? Kucherov is probably pulling pucks off the half-boards as I write this sentence. It is, by the way, currently 4:13 in the morning.
To those who say, sure, Kucherov deserves the title of captain, except he couldn’t handle the media … I ask: what media? The Lightning Radio Network? The guy from the newspaper who sometimes even travels with the team? There are no scope-light cross-examinations in the largely team-centric and team-adjacent Lightning media.
One time last year a reporter from The Hockey News had the temerity to ask in a post-game press conference about the team’s new and largely failing defensive scheme and coach Jon Cooper summarily demeaned the reporter. “We’ll get ‘em next time” platitudes can be uttered to Gabby Shirley by anyone.
Consider that two months into the 2024-2025 season Victor Hedman will turn 34. If the Lightning fall out of the playoff chase in any one of the next three years, do you think Tampa Bay Lightning general manager Julien BriseBois would so much as blink at trading a 34-year-old, 35-year-old, or 36-year-old Hedman to a contender at the deadline? The need for cap space and the desire to restock a nearly bare cupboard of prospects would at the very least temp him.
Offensively, Hedman had a very good season in 2023-2024 (76 points). However, we must keep in mind that this represented a bounce-back season and might have been more about use than anything.
Hedman wasn’t noteworthy offensively in 2022-2023 (42 points). Some of his bolstered offensive numbers in 2023-2024 were simply a factor of his returning to the first power-play unit. If you’re one of Nikita Kucherov’s primary outlets on the power play (and if you dish to the best goal-scorer born in the 1990s — Stamkos) you are going to pick up a bundle of points just by lacing up each night.
For sure, Hedman has a very heavy slap shot. He sometimes even hits the net with it. Defensively, Hedman didn’t always pass the eye test. His lack of hustle in his own zone was one factor (among several, to be sure) as to why the Lightning had their worst team defense in the Cooper era through the first three-quarters of last season. Hedman is usually the biggest player on the ice.
Yet he frequently fails to move smaller opposing forwards out of the front of the net and he often gets caught watching the puck instead of picking up a man. He is a defenseman, after all. And if he’s not the most tenacious player at the primary task of his own position what are we talking about that he’s the captain of the team?
In naming Hedman captain, the organization honored service. That in itself sends a message louder than any the man with the C on his sweater will deliver in the locker room this season.
Did Mikey Eyssimont shoot a thousand pucks a day this summer?
As I write these words, Mikey Eyssimont’s status is uncertain for the start of the season on account of a lower-body injury (imagine if you could talk so evasively at your job). What is not in doubt is that the Lightning could use someone not obvious to have a big year. Why not Mikey? There were entire periods last season in which he was the most effective forward wearing Tampa Bay blue among all players whose name doesn’t rhyme with the word Smoocherov.
Eyssimont always plays hard, drives fiercely to the net, and doesn’t take crap even when maybe he should. The one thing that’s been missing is the ability to more often finish. Imagine if he scored as many goals (25) as Nick Paul should.
Are you mad that Stamkos was jettisoned?
Sure, you’re sad Stammer is no longer on the roster. You’re sad but are you mad? We have this curious reality now where as fans we just sort of take it. We assent to the team’s point-of-view in all major moves. There is nothing that will stop us from watching and spending on sports. “It’s a business,” we will say, as if part of management. We’re not fans; we’re capitalist bystanders. As Jerry Seinfeld once quipped, “we root for laundry.”
BriseBois is trying to build a bridge from past Stanley Cups to future Stanley Cups. Maybe it will work. Hopefully, it will work. What we know for sure is that the most accomplished player in franchise history, to date, a guy who might have been the best captain in the sport, was told not to let the door hit him on the way out. Are we good with that?
Consider the moment we have all been denied: the moment two-three-four years from now when Steven Stamkos would have retired as a member of the Tampa Bay Lightning. A two-time (a three-time?) Stanley Cup champion. Our captain for life. What would that final game have been like to watch, as we waited for the emotional bookend; it would have been rarer than a Stanley Cup.
As fans, we have some power. The team should know its fan base is livid. That this move isn’t only going to serve as a catalyst for another round of jersey sales. It’s a business — sure. That doesn’t mean business has to be good.