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Why do you get the feeling, when watching the Tampa Bay Lightning operate these days, that it's like seeing two kids running wild and free in a candy store?
Moreover, why do you also get the impression that those two kids, named Oren Koules and Len Barrie, aren't doing a half-bad job, stockpiling players and generally creating a buzz for the team that they now own officially as of Monday, along with six other investors?
Let's face it: hockey ownership has lacked any real character or characters since the late Harold Ballard ran the Toronto Maple Leafs into the ground decades ago. There was a time when Mark Cuban was mentioned as a possible minority owner in Pittsburgh — Cuban has ties to the Steel City — but all ownership bets were off, as soon as Sidney Crosby landed there as the first pick in the 2005 NHL entry draft.
Ballard's reign in Toronto was problematic for long-suffering Leaf fans, but the dispassionate all-corporate think/speak you see around the league isn't exactly the right antidote either.
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- Tampa Bay Lightning
- Toronto Maple Leafs
- Sidney Crosby
- Jeff Halpern
- Jussi Jokinen
- Vincent Lecavalier
- Ryan Malone
- Vaclav Prospal
- Gary Roberts
- Brian Rolston
- Wes Walz
This, is after all, professional sport. It's supposed to be fun, right? And fun is what Koules and Barrie seem to be having, playing with their expensive new toy. It's as if they've spent the past number of years playing fantasy hockey on the sidelines, waiting their turn. Now suddenly, they can do it in real life, testing all their theories of hockey operations against the standard slow-but-steady operating philosophies in vogue elsewhere around the league.
So what if they're mortgaging the future? Or will find the team stuck with hefty unattractive contracts five years from now?
Their deals on the eve of the NHL free-agent season — for Gary Roberts, for Ryan Malone, for Vaclav Prospal and maybe for Brian Rolston — are real, and so is the money they're committing to these players. Truth be told, it's hard to dispute the fact that they're better now than were on April 5, when their massively underachieving regular season ground to a halt, with only one positive emerging from the entire fiasco — the right to draft Steven Stamkos first overall.
Prospal is back, after his playoff exile in Philadelphia, and he'll play on the top line with Vincent Lecavalier and Martin St. Louis. Malone and Stamkos will get a chance to be two-thirds of a second line — and if they could ever induce the versatile, underrated Rolston to join the fold, he would flesh out that unit nicely, and allow them to play Jussi Jokinen on the third line, along with Jeff Halpern, whenever he recovers from major off-season knee surgery.
Getting Rolston aboard would represent a major coup, there were logical and financial reasons why both Malone and Roberts were interested in going south to play in Tampa.
Apart from the presence of a former teammate, Wes Walz, on the coaching staff, Rolston has no appreciable ties to Tampa. For Rolston to go there, they'd have to demonstrate to him that they could be competitive again in the short term, because in a year when the free-agent pool is getting thinner every day, the money is going to be big, no matter where he opts to go.
It helps for the Lightning to have a couple of premium puzzle pieces — Lecavalier and Stamkos — to build around (and Lecavalier was in there, doing his best to coax Rolston into signing, as Tuesday's witching hour approached). Supplementary players are always easier to find than primary ones, especially if a team can make it financially appealing to them - and can throw in the good, Jimmy Buffett-lifestyle of the Tampa area as part of its sales pitch.
That said, it's all just a chemistry experiment in Tampa at this stage — and what looks good on paper doesn't necessarily translate well on the ice. But by dusting off famous ex-coaches, re-signing players to massive contract extensions, contacting teams about free-agents to be and paying premium prices to negotiate and then sign them to new contracts; Koules and Barrie are turning the NHL upside down — and leaving the free-agent market a little more picked over than it would have been if they'd just sat back in their owners' box, sipping mojitos and leaving the negotiations to the professionals, the way their peers generally do.
It's a new day in Tampa and a new organizational model. Let's see where it leads.
