Tim Benz: Tampa Bay’s quest for a ‘3-peat’ worthy of praise from Pittsburgh, not jealousy
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One thing I love about Pittsburgh as a sports town is that it can still surprise me on occasion. Every now and then, something sports-related fires up people, and I never saw it comin’.
From time to time, yinz get a bee in your Black and Gold bonnets that I don’t see as particularly buzzy. But as a talk show host and columnist, who am I to turn down a little unexpected content?
Recently, I had an experience like that.
Three times over the past two weeks, I found myself engaged in conversations with Penguins fans who were dead set on rooting against the Tampa Bay Lightning to win the Stanley Cup again.
Check that. They weren’t just rooting against the Lightning to win the Cup. They were rooting for the New York Rangers to beat them.
The Rangers? Those same Rangers that just dispatched the Penguins in the playoffs thanks to King Chicken Wing and his head-shot antics? The team with “Igor the Amazing Diving Goalie” and their angry, sucker-
Those Rangers? I couldn’t believe it.
And the arguments weren’t even relying on the tried and true, “Well, if the Rangers win, at least we can say the Pens lost to the Eastern Conference champs” trope.
They were all about, “I’m just sick of the Lightning. I don’t want to see the Lightning win again. I don’t want to see them win three in a row.”
OK. Again, if you prefer that Colorado wins in the Stanley Cup Final, I get it.
But, big picture — and especially against the Rangers — what beef do you have with the Lightning?
What’s funny is that no one mentioned the salary cap issue from 2021. Not that the debate surrounding that topic exactly rose to the level of Spygate or the Houston Astros allegedly wearing wires and banging on trash cans anyway. At least the NHL didn’t seem to think so.
Instead, when I pushed back on the anti-Bolts argument, every response I got was just general angst with Tampa fatigue and some sort of quasi-jealousy or threat of how Tampa’s run may be looked upon more favorably than the Penguins winning back-to-back Cups in 2016-17 and going to back-to-back Finals in 2008-09 (winning the ’09 ring).
Those arguments, I don’t get.
First of all, in terms of fatigue, I don’t feel like the Lightning are being marketed down anyone’s throat in the NHL like, say, the Yankees of the early 2000s were in Major League Baseball. Or the Patriots of the last 20 years in the NFL.
It’s not like Tampa Bay is a major hockey media market or a franchise that moves the needle when it comes to television ratings to the point that they get overly favorable treatment from the international hockey media or the NHL.
In terms of how the Lightning operate and how the team is constructed, what’s not to like? It’s a collection of home-spun draft choices and smart trades and signings. Isn’t that what every team should aspire to be?
Andrei Vasilevskiy is the best clutch goalie of the past 30 years. At least. He was a Tampa first-round draft choice. Steven Stamkos is a noble and deserving captain who just finished a 106-point season, the highest point total of his career, at age 32. Tampa is the only NHL city he’s ever called home.
Nikita Kucherov, Victor Hedman, Brayden Point, Ondrej Palat, Alex Killorn. These are all original Tampa Bay draft choices. They drafted and developed their top players well (on their own) and supplemented from there by plucking guys from other teams.
That’s what every team, in every capped sport (or uncapped — looking at you Pittsburgh Pirates) should do.
Head coach Jon Cooper doesn’t bother me. Does he subtly, passive-aggressively work the officials in between playoff games by lobbying for calls through the media? Sure. So does every other NHL coach. Better that than Gerard Gallant and his tacit endorsement and encouragement of how Jacob Trouba and the rest of his Rangers played in the Penguins series.
Frankly, if any non-Pittsburgh team is going to win three in a row in any sport, it’s hard for me to come up with a more worthy example than the Tampa Bay Lightning. It hasn’t been done in the NHL since the New York Islanders of the early 1980s. It hasn’t been done in major pro North American team sports since the Los Angeles Lakers of 2000-02.
If you don’t think this Lightning team is worthy of being in that stratosphere, tough. The results are what they are. Even the Brady-Belichick Patriots couldn’t win three Super Bowls in a row.
And if that threatens our collectively delicate Penguins sensibilities over the Crosby-Malkin Pens winning three, but not in a row, oh well. Too bad. Maybe they should’ve avoided blowing a third-period lead to the Washington Capitals in Game 5 of the 2018 Eastern Conference semifinal then. Or losing Game 6 in overtime at home.
Maybe they should’ve won the first Final series versus the Detroit Red Wings in 2008, and then Crosby and company would’ve had four rings. Or they could’ve avoided conking out in the 2013 Eastern Conference Final against the Boston Bruins.
Hey, the Lightning can empathize. It’s not like this franchise is unfamiliar with playoff failure. It can be argued that the best iteration of the Lightning was the 128-point team of 2018-19 that was swept in the first round by the Columbus Blue Jackets.
Sound familiar ‘93 Pens? How about you, ‘76 Steelers and ‘91 Pirates?
Throwing that season into the mix, not to mention the 2015 team that made the Stanley Cup Final and the 2016 and 2018 clubs that made the Conference Finals, this era of Tampa Bay hockey has been even more impressive than the scope of the last three seasons.
And I have zero complaints about it.
In this week’s hockey podcast with Brian Metzer, we discuss Tampa’s matchup against the Colorado Avalanche in the Stanley Cup Final. We analyze the trade market for the Penguins. And we discuss the prospect of Kris Letang staying in Pittsburgh for big money.
Listen: Tim Benz and Brian Metzer talk the Stanley Cup Final and the trade market for the Penguins