Tampa Bay Lightning: Jeff Halpern's celebration is incredibly tone-deaf

The Tampa Bay Lightning are not having a very good week from a PR standpoint.

When news broke that the Tampa Bay Lightning intended to eliminate 30 positions due to coronavirus, it was a crucial reminder of just how all-encompassing the world of sports has been affected by our world’s current state.

Sure, players had to leave their families behind to play in a bubble, teams saw their seasons prematurely ended without a chance to compete for a playoff spot, and the season’s 2020-21 start date is still up in the air, but they still have jobs. Teams didn’t have to suddenly shave their rosters down to 18 to save money.

Now granted, one could argue that no professional sports team should be in the position where they have to fire less than 10 percent of their workforce to save money in the middle of a global pandemic. The Lightning are worth $470 million according to Forbes, and the franchise actually increased in value 20 percent from the year prior – surely they can afford to pay some hourly employees who combined all but surely make less than Victor Hedman‘s 2020-21 base salary.

More from Puck Prose

But I digress. Even if it’s a bad look for a Stanley Cup winner to cut a little less than 10 percent of their staff to save money, most won’t switch fandoms over the move. Other teams have made similar moves over the past six months, and surely other teams will do the same before this pandemic comes to an end.

However, what shouldn’t be overlooked is just how bad this firing looks when compared to Jeff Halpern‘s absolutely tone-deaf celebration with the Stanley Cup.

Now, as you most surely know, when an NHL team wins it all, every player and the coaching staff gets a day with the Stanley Cup to celebrate. Historically, it’s a fun tradition that generates splashy pictures perfect for social media.

That’s not the problem.

What is the problem, however, is Halpern’s decision to use his day with the cup to party maskless at the Don CeSar hotel at St. Pete Beach surrounded by plenty of people I’m sure he doesn’t live with. To make matters worse, Halpern took the tradition of drinking out of the cup a step forward by passing it around to his fellow partiers, again in the middle of a pandemic.

Again, as TMZ pointed out when they initially reported on the incident, in any other year, this wouldn’t be too unusual. But now, in 2020, with 30 of his fellow Lightning employees headed for the unemployment line, this makes for a very bad look that some PR professional is going to just love dealing with.

Hopefully, one of the 30 people fired by the Lightning wasn’t their PR rep.

While I get Halpern being excited about his team’s victory, as the former center played 14 years in the league without so much as playing in a Stanley Cup, this is just a bad look. I mean, come on, he went to Princeton for goodness sake, how could he think this was a good idea? Surely someone was going to share pictures of the Stanley Cup spending an afternoon at a hotel 22 miles from the Tampa Bay International Airport, right? It’s not like that happens every day.

Celebrating Andrei Svechnikov’s lacrosse goal. dark. Next

I get Jeff Halpern wanting to celebrate his victory. I get that COVID-19 has changed a ton about the way we live our lives and robbed many of milestones like going to prom, graduating from college, or worse. But when the rest of the Tampa Bay Lightning have been relatively responsible with their individual days with the Cup, having an assistant coach throw a maskless beach party a day after the organization fired 30 people in the middle of a global pandemic is a bad look, to say the least.

Home / Tampa Bay Lightning