Even before Steven Stamkos went down, the Tampa Bay Lightning had major problems. Follow their example if you dare.
By Gare Joyce
National Hockey League history is very clear on these points: Teams have won after gassing coaches during the regular season. Teams have won with unhappy players; players who weren’t talking to management; players who weren’t talking to each other. Teams have won with stars who had already loaded their belongings into moving boxes.
The notion of winning fixing everything is magical thinking. Winning fixes a lot of things, probably most things, in the short run. For reasons that can only be guessed at, though, Steve Yzerman thought that a Stanley Cup could fix the Tampa Bay Lightning. Make no mistake about it: Something was broken in Tampa long before Anton Stralman went down with a season-ending injury and Steven Stamkos was diagnosed with a blood clot, likely keeping him out of the Lightning’s spring run and, possibly, marking the end of his time with the team.
Generally speaking, an outfit that goes to the Final one year and is chasing the Cup the next doesn’t have to set up a press conference for the GM to announce that the franchise player won’t be traded. But that’s exactly what Yzerman had to do mid-season. And with that, all the pieces were in place to win a Cup. Or to come apart. Or both.
There is no definitive guide for assembling a Stanley Cup winner, but here’s the handbook Lightning ownership and management have been working from. If you choose to steal a page from it you proceed at your own (considerable) risk.
STEP ONE
HIRE A HEADSTRONG LEGEND
When Yzerman hung up his skates and moved into the role of vice-president of the Detroit Red Wings in 2006, he made it sound like an internship. “For me, initially, it’s going to be almost an education in how the business works and the management side of running a team,” Yzerman said. “What I’ll be doing is spending time with Kenny [Holland] and Jim Nill and Jimmy D [Jim Devellano] in the hockey department, and observing how they operate, whether it be contract negotiations, player analysis, just sitting in, listening and watching hockey.”
At the time, everyone inside the organization thought this was rich, the mere suggestion that Yzerman had anything to learn about the business of the Red Wings. After all, he had been in the middle of it for more than 20 years. He knew better than anyone that a few basic principles applied.
At its root, Detroit wasn’t a players’ organization. No star had all the pull, like Mario had in Pittsburgh. Communication didn’t go from ground up. It went from the top down on every count. Players were put in their place by the coaches—first by the most brutal taskmaster, Scotty Bowman, and then the less draconian Mike Babcock. (Let us skip over the brief interregnum of Dave Lewis.) The working hands had to develop a tolerance for both the night-in, night-out drudgery of a 200-foot game and occasional humiliation. Famously, Bowman put Sergei Fedorov, only a couple of years removed from the Hart Trophy, on the blueline for a stretch of games—not because of a shortage of personnel but as a slap-down. That’s how Bowman had won in Montreal, suffering no pushback, demanding praise-free sacrifice.
Because Yzerman bought in, no one could opt out. That said, if you weren’t in Yzerman’s favour, you were well-advised to rent rather than buy in Detroit. That’s what he wanted for Tampa Bay.
STEP TWO
ALLOW A RETIRED PLAYER TO KEEP PLAYING
Of the players on the Lightning’s roster when Yzerman arrived, the most intriguing might have been Vincent Lecavalier. From the first time that he donned a Tampa Bay sweater at the ’98 draft, Lecavalier had been burdened by crushing expectations. The then-owner of the Lightning, Art Williams, infamously pronounced that Lecavalier was going to be “the Michael Jordan of hockey.” Suffice to say, Lecavalier went on to be something less than that, although he definitely had his moments, most notably a leading role in the Lightning’s Stanley Cup run in ’04 and, months later, an MVP award with the winning Canadian team at the World Cup.
The “Jordan thing” seemed to be behind Lecavalier until unrealistic expectations revisited him again in the summer of ’08, when then-GM Brian Lawton signed him to an unfathomable seven-year, $85-million deal. Lecavalier had scored 50 goals in a season once and was much more than a serviceable player, but $85 million crushed the Lightning’s cap and weighed heavily on their star player. First he couldn’t live up to hype and then he seemed to stop trying.
Yzerman’s challenge was to reach Lecavalier, to somehow convince him to embrace a mid-career change in his game like his own in Detroit. The Red Wings had taken several players who seemed to have long passed their best-before dates and squeezed useful seasons out of them.
Certainly this was the logic when Lecavalier was named captain the fall after Yzerman’s arrival. But the Lecavalier renaissance just didn’t take and the massive contract would be bought out in 2013. In fairness to Yzerman, Lecavalier’s contract was immovable. But the problem was that Lecavalier himself couldn’t be moved either.
STEP THREE
FIRE THE GOOD COP, HIRE THE BAD COP
When Yzerman joined the Lightning, his first move seemed an inspired one: the hiring of Guy Boucher, who in his one season as a head coach in the American Hockey League turned Montreal’s affiliate in Hamilton into a powerhouse. And the early returns with Boucher were resoundingly positive: The Bolts took the Bruins to seven games in the 2011 Eastern Conference Final.
Still, Yzerman didn’t approve of a few fundamental points of Boucher’s player-management style. He was a players’ coach, a cheerleader, not Scotty Bowman so much as Jacques Demers redux (the original being no favourite of Yzerman’s). At times, it seemed that Boucher coached the team by committee, sounding out Martin St. Louis in practice. And behind the scenes, many resented Boucher conversing in French with Francophone staffers and players—it rubbed Anglophones the wrong way.
As soon as Yzerman had a good reason to sack Boucher—in the spring of 2013—he did.
The standard in NHL management circles is to hire a bad cop after pink-slipping a good cop. Jon Cooper was Yzerman’s choice, and a logical one. Back in 2010, Yzerman had hired Cooper to coach the Lightning’s AHL affiliate, and Cooper had impressed—the Norfolk Admirals won a Calder Cup in 2012.
The Lightning thrived under Cooper. The “triplets”—Tyler Johnson, Ondrej Palat and Nikita Kucherov—took off under the coach who knew them from the AHL, and Cooper made them the de facto first line on the run to the Final last spring. When Cooper pulled the goalie in favor of an extra skater and left Steven Stamkos on the bench, and when he routinely sent out three other players for shootouts, it worried the coach not. The last guy had tried to win the popularity contest and look what it got him: fired. Cooper’s indifference to his players’ feelings landed him a four-year extension.
STEP FOUR
ALIENATE YOUR HEART AND SOUL
Martin St. Louis had come into the league as an undrafted free agent, and in Tampa Bay he’d won the Cup and the Hart and a couple of scoring titles, one at 37. Through the 2013–14 season, he maintained the work ethic of a player who had to win a spot on the roster every season, every game, every practice. And yet in February 2014, with an Olympic gold medal in his pocket, St. Louis demanded a trade out of Tampa.
St. Louis was hurt when he was originally passed over for the Canadian team going to Sochi. That his own GM was the one passing him over seemed to make it intolerable. St. Louis eventually wound up on the team when Stamkos couldn’t come back from a broken leg in time for the Games, but the relationship between St. Louis and Yzerman couldn’t be repaired.
Of course, it didn’t have to get to that point. “Steve was in the perfect position to talk to Marty, explain his position and manage expectations,” says an agent who knows both. “And he didn’t. With Steve, things are hard and fast. He’s not a guy to soften it up when he has bad news to break to you.”
In Yzerman’s organization, like the Wings, things were going to be told rather than discussed. And when St. Louis asked to be traded, that wasn’t discussed either. Yzerman sent the fans’ favourite player packing to the New York Rangers for Ryan Callahan.
STEP FIVE
ALIENATE YOUR FRANCHISE PLAYER
This is the bottom line in the NHL circa 2016: partnership between a franchise player and the franchise. You need only to look at Pittsburgh to see it play out for better and worse—or rather worse and better, if taken chronologically. Sidney Crosby never bought into the Mike Johnston experiment and blended into the background until a coaching change was made. Teams commit to their stars. They lock them up for the long term. They do whatever they can to get the most out of them.
Back in his junior days, Stamkos always told people that his favorite player growing up was Yzerman, and you could see similarities in their games. You’d have bet theirs would be a beautiful friendship. But that’s not what Yzerman had in mind.
According to those close to the negotiations, and despite all the speculation to the contrary, Stamkos never wanted to play anywhere other than Tampa when he and his agent, Don Meehan, went to talk contract in 2011. He was happy in the market. The team was coming off its run to the Eastern Conference Final. Nothing was wrong with this picture. He was a restricted free agent, and many in his bracket were being locked up for seven years or more. But they didn’t think Yzerman was offering fair market value over the long term, something that Stamkos would find at the end of the contract. Thus, player and agent opted to sign a five-year, $37.5-million deal, which looked pretty sweet in the team’s favor for a couple of seasons, but a lot less so now that Stamkos has all the leverage, with unrestricted free agency just months off.
“It just shouldn’t have gotten this far,” says a league executive. “It was either that [Yzerman] was stubborn, which is his reputation, or inexperienced. It was a calculated risk [for Stamkos]. Sacrifice some term, leave some guaranteed money on the table, risk injury but get to [unrestricted free agency] early. Stamkos gambled and he’s winning. Why didn’t the Lightning go for [a longer] term? Are you worried he’s going to slide back? There’s no question about work ethic or coasting. Stamkos is the guy you offer term to. It’s a miscalculation for Yzerman.”
So just two years after St. Louis delivered his trade demand, Yzerman found himself in an entirely different but equally awkward position: announcing that Stamkos would not be traded, even though the Bolts stand to lose him this summer to the highest bidder without compensation. “I have said repeatedly that it is our hope to reach an agreement with Steven on a new contract at some point,” Yzerman’s statement read. “With 27 games remaining in the season, our entire organization, Steven included, wants to focus on making the playoffs.”
Evidently, Braydon Coburn’s ability to focus wasn’t impaired by contract talks: The lumbering blueliner signed a three-year extension worth $11 million the week after. This was just the latest in a series of cap-crushing deals that Yzerman inexplicably extended to players with Stamkos’s UFA looming on the horizon—Callahan at $5.8 million per year until 2020, anyone?
Says one agent not involved in any of those deals: “Fact is, these are the guys you look after once you’ve looked after the top of the roster. It’s how they’ve done it in Chicago so well—Toews, Kane and Keith get theirs and then you do what you can to give them the talent to skate with. You lose a guy like Brandon Saad just on the cap, but that’s a price you have to pay. [Yzerman] is going the other way. And it can screw you up two ways. One’s basic: You’re committing a significant amount of space before you get the big deals done. The other’s sort of political: Your star players can feel like they’re not the priority anymore—sounds thin-skinned, but some players and agents will take it that way.”
OPTIONAL
MESS WITH YOUR YOUNGSTERS
L’affaire Drouin is only a minor matter in the state of the franchise in the spring of 2016, but it has huge implications should Stamkos seek out less tropical pastures as a free agent.
The Lightning owned the No. 3 pick in the 2013 draft and used it to select Jonathan Drouin of the Halifax Mooseheads. In only slight contrast to Stamkos, Drouin’s favourite player growing up was Pavel Datsyuk, who came in and reprised Yzerman’s role with the Wings. As draft picks go, a third-overall pick is treasure and Drouin was no reach there even though they could have had Seth Jones, who would be an ideal fit in Tampa. But the reality is Drouin’s transition to the NHL has been far rockier and less productive than Jones’s, and he’s way behind schedule for a kid drafted in his slot.
In December, Yzerman sent the lightly played Drouin down to Syracuse of the AHL. This didn’t go over well in the Drouin camp (although the other players on the Lightning weren’t exactly sympathetic, especially those who put in hours on the bus in the AHL with Cooper). And when Drouin demanded a trade and then refused to report, Yzerman did the reasonable and expected thing: He suspended him without pay. Not to accommodate Drouin so much as make the best of a bad situation, however, Yzerman did test the market. He just didn’t like the return—in the neighborhood of 50 cents on the dollar. No one was prepared to offer fair value for a perceived malcontent.
In March, Drouin did report to the AHL affiliate in Syracuse and by all reports played well. (As this story goes online, he missed a game with an undisclosed injury.) In fact, given Stamkos’s status with his blood clot and impending free agency, no one can rule out Drouin winding up back in Tampa Bay this spring or next season. Still, it didn’t have to be this way, and the situation seems mishandled no matter what comes out of it. Not that Yzerman should be expected to coddle Drouin or anything of the sort. Yzerman has all the player cred that any GM ever had, and if he’d just talked to Drouin and spelled out his position, getting him to buy in rather than force-feeding him, a lot of acrimony could have been avoided. And if Drouin’s career takes off and he emerges as a star, which is entirely possible, no doubt he’ll remember past indignities when it comes time to talk contract.
Yzerman went all in to win this season. He had done enough right for Tampa Bay to take a run at the Stanley Cup again this spring, but enough wrong that if Stamkos had carried the Cup on a lap of the rink, it might still have been the last time he’d ever wear a Lightning sweater. But now, through a couple of unforeseeable bad breaks, Yzerman has busted out. His team will need a miracle every other night for two months to play for the Cup. And if winning can’t fix everything, neither will such a disappointing, desultory end.
There are no instructions for what to do after that.
Photo credit: Scott Audette/NHLI/Getty