It’s a special group of people that are ready to continue to pay that price. But I think a big thing is, are you ready to saddle up and do it again? Because it’s a tremendous price. The salary cap era has created different challenges.
POKER QUEST LIGHTNING PRO
The road to the Cup is the toughest in pro sports, putting a premium on physical and mental endurance. Gretzky has said he grasped the commitment needed to win the Cup when he passed the Islanders’ locker room after they beat his Oilers in 1983 and saw them quietly clutching icebags, not champagne bottles. Since the cap was adopted in 2005, only the 2016-17 Penguins and the Lightning have won back-to-back titles. Before they lost to the younger, fresher Oilers in the 1984 Final, the Islanders won 19 straight playoff series, a record that might never be equaled.
Their fortunes changed when Torrey acquired Butch Goring from the Kings in March 1980 and he became a leader and ideal No. Built largely through the draft by general manager Bill Torrey, they were favored to win in 19 but fell short, sparking rumors they’d be broken up. They also were the first Cup champion to win four rounds. The Islanders, underappreciated because they played in the suburbs and in the shadow of the glamorous New York Rangers, were tough but brilliantly skilled. He gathered a pantheon of Hall of Famers, and they won four straight championships starting in 1976.
After the NHL tripled in size, general manager Sam Pollock sustained their supremacy by fleecing weak teams out of prime draft picks. In a six-team league they had to win only two playoff rounds, but they had otherworldly talent. The Montreal Canadiens set the NHL record by winning the Cup five times in a row from 1956 through 1960. “If they were to pull this off and win three in a row, to me that’s almost like winning five in a row in this era,” said Ducks general manager Pat Verbeek, who was Tampa Bay’s director of pro scouting, assistant GM and director of player personnel from 2010 to 2019. They’ve nibbled around the edges of their roster to stay under the cap - and skated through a loophole by putting Nikita Kucherov on long-term injured reserve until the cap-less playoffs began last season - but they haven’t faded. The obstacles Tampa Bay has overcome to build a budding dynasty in a league that’s structured to promote parity makes its story unique and extraordinary.ĭespite operating under a salary cap that stayed flat when COVID-19 slammed NHL revenues, playing a pandemic-interrupted season that ended in a fan-less bubble in 2020 and making a quick turnaround after repeating as champions last July 7, the Lightning have maintained their drive and depth.
They will continue their quest for a third straight Cup championship when they open the Cup Final on Wednesday in Denver against Colorado, which lost only two games in winning the West. The Tampa Bay Lightning have a chance to earn a slice of hockey immortality and accomplish a feat that eluded those great Oilers, Penguins and Red Wings teams. Steve Yzerman led the powerful Red Wings to titles in 1997 and ’98 but they lost in the second round in 1999. Mario Lemieux played for Cup winners in 19 and was an owner when the Pittsburgh Penguins won in 2009, 20 but he never won three straight. He won the Cup four times and they won five times in seven seasons, but he and they never won three in a row. Wayne Gretzky twice won back-to-back titles in the 1980s with the high-scoring Edmonton Oilers, who had seven future Hall of Famers.
Stated simply, if it were easy to win the Stanley Cup three straight times somebody would have done it since the New York Islanders won four straight championships, starting in 1980.
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