Can Lightning strike a third time?

Two Cups make Bolts a model for rest of league to follow

Considering the NHL’s obsession with competitive balance, it says something that four of the past six Stanley Cups have been won by two franchises that have pulled off unlikely feats.

The Pittsburgh Penguins and Tampa Bay Lightning are the only two teams to win back-to-back championships in the salary-cap era. And as the Lightning arrived in Toronto for Thursday’s game against the Maple Leafs, it was worth asking: What are the odds Tampa Bay finds a way to do something even rarer — specifically, become the first NHL team to win three Cups in succession since the 1980s New York Islanders?

Sidney Crosby’s Penguins couldn’t do it. Neither could Mario Lemieux’s. Heck, it’s such a tall task that the 1980s Oilers, which won five Cups over a seven-season span, twice winning back-to-back titles, never managed to string together three straight.

In many ways, it’ll be a test of depth for the Lightning. If thriving without the services of marquee players is one of the marks of an elite NHL franchise, they’ve spent the early part of this season passing with flying colours. The club that won the 2019-20 Stanley Cup with captain Steven Stamkos playing all of a few playoff shifts has weathered the outset of this season largely minus the likes of Nikita Kucherov and Brayden Point. And they came into Thursday’s game with GTA product Anthony Cirelli, another core piece, out with an injury.

Add to those shelvings the off-season turnover that saw the departure of the entire third line of Yanni Gourde, Barclay Goodrow and Blake Coleman, not to mention longtime fixture Tyler Johnson, and it’s easy to see why more than a few pundits peppered their preseason prognostications about the two-time defending champions with a generous sprinkle of skepticism.

Still, there’s a reason why the Lightning have been maddeningly consistent in their dominance. And if you were looking at the situation from a Toronto perspective, considering how impressively the Maple Leafs have been playing over the past few weeks, it had to be at least a little disheartening to see the Lightning lugging around a superior points percentage into Thursday. That’s the same Lightning that was desperate enough for help that it claimed centreman Riley Nash off waivers from Winnipeg the other day — the same Nash who was a nonfactor bit player in two playoff games for the Maple Leafs last spring.

“We’re probably going to need him a little more than I guess most teams have needed him in the past, just because of how thin we are down the middle,” Cooper told reporters of Nash. “He’s definitely going to get a chance.”

The Lightning, for all their tales of woe, came into Toronto on a fourgame win streak. And when Cooper has been asked how they’re doing it, he’s been definitive. The Lightning have always been known as a highflying offensive juggernaut; if you add up the numbers going back to the season in which they first made the Stanley Cup final in the Stamkos era, in 2014-15, they’ve scored more regular-season goals than any other franchise. But they’ve also allowed the fourth-fewest goals against per game over that span, in no small part to employing the best goaltender on the planet in Andrei Vasilevskiy and one of the top defenceman of the era in Victor Hedman.

“You have to defend. For the most part we’ve been doing a pretty good job of that, and we’re eking out points,” Cooper said. “That’s basically how we have to survive here with some of our top offensive guys out.”

In a season in which the Maple Leafs, who rank second in goalsagainst per game, appear to have come to a similar conclusion — the idea that one’s level of sustainable, all-weather success will ultimately be defined best by how few goals a team gives up rather than how many it can get — Toronto is attempting a similar trick, albeit without a couple of fresh banners hanging in their building. With Mitch Marner out with a shoulder problem for what’s expected to be the next few weeks, and with the defensive depth depleted by injuries to Rasmus Sandin and Travis

Dermott, the Maple Leafs are treading through some potentially difficult terrain. As fastidiously as they’ve played, on Thursday Keefe described his group as a “really tired team.”

“How we played through November, we were so consistent. That takes a toll. Our guys put a lot into it. So I just feel like we were breaking down a little bit,” Keefe said. “Maybe it’s no coincidence that we’ve lost some guys to injury through this.”

If a month or so of mostly elitelevel play has taken a toll on the Maple Leafs, you can imagine what the prospect of three straight Cup runs might do to the Lightning.

As Mike Sullivan, the coach of the Pittsburgh team that won back-toback rings in 2016 and 2017: “My experience coaching in this league is that, in a lot of ways, it’s harder to handle success than to handle failure. So when you invest so much to win the Stanley Cup, you now have to ask everyone to reinvest with not a whole lot of time in between.

That’s a difficult challenge.”

There are levels to the game, of course, and some teams take baby steps in their journey to what they hope turns out to be the top. Toronto’s recent run of success had some members of the team acknowledging that the Maple Leafs have previously harboured a habit of relaxing in the face of even the most modest stretches of success, never mind the pipe dream of back-to-back Cup triumphs.

“(In) past years … maybe we’ve played a couple of really good games and then we just relax and take our foot off the gas,” William Nylander told reporters last month.

As the Maple Leafs try to rev themselves up for second straight month — hoping for an excellent December after absorbing the toll of a superior November — the Lightning are trying to keep their foot on the gas long enough to hang a third straight banner. In a league obsessed with competitive balance, it would be a statement of dominance without precedent.

The Maple Leafs have previously harboured a habit of relaxing in the face of even the most modest stretches of success