TAMPA, Fla. — Every year in the salary cap era, we see an example of a team aging out, a former contender that simply can’t contend anymore because of the financial realities of trying to keep a winning group together while also keeping it young enough to compete.
This season, we are watching that happen with the Pittsburgh Penguins, despite new general manager Kyle Dubas’ best efforts to extend that competitive window. It would also be tempting to say we are seeing it with the Tampa Bay Lightning, except unlike the Penguins, the Lightning are sitting relatively comfortably in a playoff spot.
Except the Lightning’s past success has made it so their holding the final wild card spot in the Eastern Conference seems like a disappointment, only because the standard the organization has set over the last decade, but particularly the last five years, is ridiculously high.
Perhaps unattainably high.
When asked this question last week, about the high bar the Lightning has set, head coach Jon Cooper immediately pointed two fingers to either side of his head, where there are two framed jerseys commemorating the Lightning’s Stanley Cup wins in 2020 and 2021.
Those frames represent the bar the Lightning has set, the burden of their own success.
“That was the fruits of our labor,” Cooper said last Friday afternoon in his office at the Lightning practice facility. “There was a lot of labor of Game 7 conference final heartbreaks, twice, a 62-win season and being swept, there was a lot of success that ended in heartbreak that led to these. But we did it over a decade, and we’re really proud of that.”
Cooper said he thinks it’s unfair to compare this year’s Lightning team to those back-to-back champions, and he’s right. But that’s the nature of it, and he knows it.
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