TAMPA, FLA – When Jeff Vinik hired Steve Yzerman to be the General Manager of his Tampa Bay Lightning, everyone expected the former Detroit Red Wing great to recreate the winning recipe that the Bolts had when they won the Stanley Cup in 2004. Since 2011, Tampa’s fortunes have ebbed and flowed with a trip to the Eastern Conference finals in 2011 before losing to eventual champion Boston and this season’s run to the Stanley Cup Final where the Lightning fell to the Chicago Blackhawks in six grueling games.
Now that the playoffs are over, Yzerman now has to set his sights on Sunrise, Florida and the upcoming NHL Entry Draft. Despite dealing away its own pick, Tampa Bay still ended up with a selection in the first round thanks to a deal with the New York Rangers – the team the Lightning eliminated in the Eastern Conference finals. It is one of nine picks – only three of which originally belonged to the franchise – that Yzerman will get to use as he wishes.
On the surface, one would think that the Lightning would not need much help. Tampa Bay finished the season with a 50-24-8 record, good for fifth best in the NHL. The team scored a league-high 3.16 goals per game while allowing 2.51 goals against per contest, good for 12th overall. Tampa’s power play ranked in the middle of the pack at 18.8 percent (14th overall) but its penalty killing finished in the top ten with a success rate of 83.7 percent (7th place).
As he has done for much of his career, Steven Stamkos was the leader of the pack when it came to putting pucks into the net. The Lightning captain lit the lamp 43 times to go along with 29 assists for a total of 72 points. Ryan Callahan, who was acquired from the Rangers for Marty St. Louis last season, chipped in with 24 goals and 30 assists for 54 points and plenty of veteran experience in the locker room.
The biggest surprise of the season for Jon Cooper’s team came when the head coach got the idea to create a line using players he had worked with in the AHL. Tyler Johnson (29-43-72), Nikita Kucherov (29-36-65) and Ondrej Palat (16-47-63) turned out to be Tampa’s biggest threat on the ice during both the regular season and in the playoffs.
Defensively, the Lightning did quite well with a mix of twenty-somethings and thirty-somethings along the blue line. Victor Hedman was lauded almost daily for his work in the post-season while Anton Stralman made great strides in his play. Between the pipes, Ben Bishop willed Tampa to the finals while playing the final three games of the title series with what ended up being a torn groin. His backup Andrei Vasilevskiy turned in a gutsy relief performance to steal a win from the Blackhawks in game three and nearly did the same with a start in game four.
So where do the Lightning go when it comes time for their first round selection in the draft? Looking at the roster as it stands, all but Brenden Morrow (unrestricted free agent) and Vladislav Namestnikov (restricted free agent) are locked up for next season when it comes to the forwards. The same can be said of the defensemen where only Andrej Sustr (RFA) is the only regular not set with a contract for next season. Both Bishop and Vasilevskiy are set for the next two seasons.
As of now, Tampa’s cap hit for the 52 players under contract to the team is $67,887,973. With the cap for next season projected to be in the area of $71 million, the Lightning will have to be looking to put themselves in a position for next summer when Stamkos becomes an unrestricted free agent and is expected to be looking for in excess of $8 million per season over eight to ten years (similar to Jonathan Toews and Patrick Kane in Chicago). Also heading to free agency prior to the 2016-2017 season are Kucherov, Cedric Paquette, JT Brown and Braydon Coburn. With the likes of Johnson, Palat, Jonathan Drouin, Valterri Filppula, Hedman, Bishop and Vasilevskiy coming due prior to the 2017-2018 season, Yzerman is going to have to start getting creative.
Skimming through the non-roster players, eleven are set for some form of free agency right now. The position that gets hit the worst is right wing where only two players out of five who were on the AHL Syracuse roster are not up for a new contract. Yes the coaches in the Lightning system can get fancy with moving players into other positions (no less than seven players were listed as being centers on this year’s NHL roster) but having skilled players playing their natural positions is a much better way to develop talent.
Tampa Bay needs to be restocking the shelves with talent behind the current roster with an eye to the future. That being said, expect to hear Yzerman on Draft Night say:
“With the 28th pick in the 2015 NHL Entry Draft, the Tampa Bay Lightning select, from Lada Togliatti of the MHL (Russian junior league), right wing Denis Guryanov.”
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