Tampa Bay Lightning’s Stanley Cup win deserves no asterisk

Forget an asterisk. The Tampa Bay Lightning won arguably the toughest Stanley Cup in NHL history.

The Tampa Bay Lightning have won their first Stanley Cup since 2004. It came just over 18 months since they got swept by the Columbus Blue Jackets in the first round of the 2019 Stanley Cup Playoffs. Though the Lightning’s Stanley Cup win did not come in a traditional postseason, their win should not have an asterisk.

There was nothing easy about Tampa’s win. They had to come into a chaotic postseason and they emerged as the best team. The Lightning have had to learn some painful lessons in recent years. They had to use every one of them to win the Stanley Cup.

Champions are teams who overcome adversity. And the Lightning sure did that. They had to face the same Blue Jackets squad who swept them a year ago in the first round. Tampa had to do this after a mostly pointless round-robin tournament while Columbus was already in playoff mode. The Blue Jackets didn’t make it easy for the Lightning, but they eliminated them in five games.

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Then in the second round, they had to overcome a strong divisional foe in the Boston Bruins. Even after losing Game 1, the Lightning didn’t lose focus. In fact, they came back to win the next four games. Remember, the Bruins were, at the time, the reigning Eastern Conference Champions. They were a battle tested team, even without goaltender Tuukka Rask.

In the Eastern Conference Final, the Lightning have to face the New York Islanders, who had driven the Washington Capitals and Philadelphia Flyers out of the Toronto bubble earlier in the postseason. Their physical brand of hockey presented a unique challenge to Tampa. At one point, the Lightning were without their top scorer Brayden Point. But it didn’t matter. The Lightning won in six games.

And then in the Stanley Cup Final, the Tampa Bay Lightning had to face their toughest opponent yet. A more relentless version of the Islanders in the Dallas Stars. The Stars fought hard and even though they were too beat up in the end, the Lightning didn’t have it easy by any means.

They had to spend more than two months in a bubble away from their loved ones, all but cut off from society. Yet the Tampa Bay Lightning remained focused on their goal to lift the Stanley Cup. They did all of this while having their team captain Steven Stamkos play a grand total of 167 seconds for the entire Stanley Cup Playoffs, by the way.

Tampa had to be tempted to blow things up after being swept by the Blue Jackets. General Manager Julien BriseBois walked into a very tough situation. In the end, he elected to show faith in his team. And his roster rewarded him for it.

BriseBois made all the right moves to tinker with his roster, adding Pat Maroon and Kevin Shattenkirk for dirt cheap during the offseason. He navigated a tough season, but still needed to fix his third line at the trade deadline. Armed with two first-round picks (one of them thanks to trading J.T. Miller to the Vancouver Canucks in the offseason), he got Blake Coleman and Barclay Goodrow.

On second thought, maybe there should be an asterisk attached to the Tampa Bay Lightning’s Stanley Cup win. It should say “won the Stanley Cup in the craziest, most chaotic, and most difficult postseason in NHL history”.