Tampa Bay Lightning

Oh, how fondly we all remember the summer of 2008... sure, the Tampa Bay Lightning had just stumbled to a last place finish and Cup-winning coach John Tortorella was making his way out the door, but #SeenStamkos was a thing, and wacky new owners with fashionable hairstyles were coming to Tampa Bay to make everything just super. Hooray! Welcome Oren and Len! OK Hockey is here to save the day! You may remember, as they started their crazy-guy attempt to get every NHL forward, they traded for the negotiating rights to Ryan Malone and Gary Roberts, who had just impressed us all with their gutsy playoff performances for the Pittsburgh Penguins, who had just lost in the Stanley Cup Final. Wow! These cray-cray new owners are going for it! Of course, every move wasn't golden. They decided if you had enough forwards you didn't need blueliners, and they decided Barry Melrose could still coach in this league. Sure, they were OMG awful, but what would you expect from a horror movie producer and a former NHL grinder who at that point in his life spent his time threatening to bulldoze sacred burial grounds to build golf courses? You expect... horror. The... horror... They fell apart, and the Lightning were taken away from them and given to someone who isn't nuts. And yes, Oren and Len were the worst NHL owners since His Dark Majesty Satan finally collected Toronto's Harold Ballard. But for just a little while, in that wacky summer of 2008, they let us all watch someone act out the ultimate fan fantasy. After all, haven't you ever imagined what you would do if you were suddenly an NHL owner? What kind of power-moves would you make? And so I ask the writers of Raw Charge and the broader Bolt-o-Sphere: If you were a crazy megalomaniac who owned the Lightning, who would you want to poach for the Bolts? Would you grab whoever is currently kicking bum in the playoffs? Abduct a secret crush? Don't worry about realistic trades. You're crazy! Tell us your fantasy, you nut! Clark Brooks, Raw Charge contributor: Hmm, I'm a crazy megalomaniac, specifically patterned after a certain two crazy megalomaniacs... In that case, I will have paid very close attention to how positively my existing fan base reacted to all the nostalgia during the various 20th anniversary celebrations. That means I have two names on my list: Boyle and Richards. However, since I am a crazy megalomaniac, the last thing I'm going to do is make an attempt to actually appease my fan base, so I'm not talking about Dan and Brad; I'm talking about the Rangers' Brian Boyle and Mike Richards of the Kings. Ha ha! Had you there for a minute, didn't I, Lightning fans? I'm in your heads now! Good players, yes, but I need forwards like I need more hair products, which I am going out to shop for now with the money I made from selling our trophy cases and Dave Mishkin on Craigslist. Also, I'm going after Chris Gratton and Vaclav Prospal because I miss those guys and they're overdue for yet another return to Tampa Bay. Now I am bored and this is something my coach is just going to have to figure out. Worship me as a god! (And don't forget to check out "Saw 16; Electric Boogaloo" being released direct to VHS sooner than any of us would have ever reasonably expected). Clark again, because he really got into this: Taylor Pyatt, because we've never had a pair of brothers on the Lightning before (well, we've had brothers but not brothers). I'm sure that's something that Phil and Tony Esposito could appreciate and it's worked out pretty well in Vancouver with the Sedin twins. Plus, any collector of sports memorabilia knows that having a complete set of something is worth more. Wait...there's a third brother who never played in the NHL? Eh, forget it. John Fontana, managing editor of Raw Charge: Impulsive signings by a would-be megalomaniac playing fantasy hockey with a professional sports team? How could that go wrong? I am so trading for the rights to Jarome Iginla and Jaromir

The Eastern Conference Finals of the 2013 Calder Cup Playoffs are set! After a successful 4-game sweep of the Number Two seed Springfield Falcons, the Syracuse Crunch are moving on to the Eastern Conference Finals to face the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton Penguins. Mar 23, 2013; Ottawa, ON, CAN; Tampa Bay Lightning centre Tyler Johnson (63) controls the puck in the first period against the Ottawa Senators at Scotiabank Place. Mandatory Credit: Marc DesRosiers-USA TODAY Sports Their opponents, the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton Penguins, moved on to the next round just last night after defeating the Number One seed Providence Bruins in Game 7 of the Eastern Conference Semifinals 5-0. Being the higher seed in the series, the Crunch will get home ice advantage in this series. The first puck of the Eastern Conference Finals will drop on Saturday, May 25th at 7:00 p.m. EST at the War Memorial Arena in Syracuse. Below is the complete schedule for the Eastern Conference Finals between the Number Three seed Syracuse Crunch and the Number Five seed Wilkes-Barre/Scranton Penguins. All times are Eastern Standard Time. Game 1 – Saturday, May 25th – Penguins at Crunch            7:00 p.m. Game 2 – Sunday, May 26th – Penguins at Crunch              7:00 p.m. Game 3 – Wednesday, May 29th – Crunch at Penguins       7:05 p.m. Game 4 – Friday, May 31st – Crunch at Penguins                 7:05 p.m. * Game 5 – Saturday, June 1st – Penguins at Crunch           7:00 p.m. * Game 6 – Monday, June 3rd – Crunch at Penguins             7:05 p.m. * Game 7 – Wednesday, June 5th – Penguins at Crunch       7:00 p.m. * Denotes if necessary We here at Bolts By The Bay wish our Tampa Bay Lightning affiliate, the Syracuse Crunch the best of luck in the Calder Cup Playoffs Eastern Conference Finals. Do you think the Crunch will be moving on to the Calder Cup Finals, or do you think the Penguins are going to put a skidding halt to the Crunch’s hot streak? How many games do you think this series is going to go? Let us know what you think in the comments below. Be sure to stay up-to-date with all the latest Lightning news and updates with Bolts By the Bay. LIKE us on Facebook at Bolts By The Bay, and you can follow us on Twitter at @BoltsByTheBay

Jon Cooper Twitter Chat Transcript

I love this game of hockey. I really do. I love the sounds of it, from bad arena music to the blare of the goal horn. I love the way the ice smells. I love being crowded into a tiny space with 17,000 or so other maniacs (and their kids) all screaming our heads off. I love the semi-controlled chaos of it all. Seriously, I love how the game can move from elegant to crude and back in a split-second. I love the feeling of being connected to millions of people from all over the world and every walk of life as a hockey fan. I love our strange, snarky sense of humor and the way we simultaneously need to invest the tiniest thing with some form of Ultimate Meaning and to strip all pretensions of ultimate-ness away and see things realistically. Hockey is a passion for me, one that I cherish. And sometimes, just sometimes, I wish I hadn't ever chosen to write about it, even as a hobby. You see, writing about the game changes the way you watch games. You start to pick things apart looking for the "in" to a story. A season can easily become a long string of analytical triggers when you're tasked with coming up with words about hockey on a regular basis. You start looking for the fault lines and the pressure points, trying to understand if this player or that one is doing okay, great, poorly, craptastic. At exactly what point do they falter? How much weight should they they bear? You start to try to link performances together in ways that aren't wholly natural. Is this a trend? How long has it been happening? How long will it continue? What is anomalous and what is "real?" Plays and players become evidence, proof of goodness or badness, rather than moments with ephemeral and complex connections. Writing about hockey requires freezing it, dismantling it, and rearranging the pieces into some new picture that isn't really hockey anymore, not as it's lived, anyway. I miss the strange kind of timelessness that watching a hockey game can be. I miss having the action roll over me in a tide, carrying me along, ready to drop me off at some unknowable point a few hours, minutes, or seconds in the future--a new place in time and in life. I miss losing my breath over what will happen next. I come to hate having to tie time down and inscribe it with meaning. I crave the potentiality of every moment leading into a million other possible moments. I think, in a way, getting involved in hockey statistics makes this sort of disconnect from the lived experience of the game starker. The stats "project," after all, is self-consciously aimed at tearing down the old narratives, ones more suited to feeling the game than thinking it. The intention behind the creation of new statistics is to break apart old assumptions about cause and effect in hockey and substitute a new "Truth," which will in its own time be deconstructed in favor of the Newest Hockey Testament. And in order to do stats, you have to come to a whole new understanding of hockey time and how it's built. Break everything down into increments of shots and attempted shots and then build upwards, stacking shots on shots on shots until you get years, seasons worth of time, and that's your new hockey experience. Games are, to one extent or another, irrelevant as blocks of time. What matters is categories of action--even strength, score tied, goalie in net. The holism of hockey, the ebb and flow and swoop of it, is too much for the statistics to handle. There is a time and a place for hockey analytics. These are excellent tools for describing certain aspects of the game that we otherwise would have no useful language for. But there are times, like right after the season ends, when analyzing it all is too much for me to handle. It's been nearly a month since the Lightning's season ended, and I've spent that month--that is, the part of it not spent on real life--simply living hockey again. I've watched NHL playoffs and AHL playoffs and World Championships. At first, it was

You've likely heard already, but if you haven't: former Tampa Bay Lightning center Brad Richards (now playing for the New York Rangers) will be a healthy scratch for tonight's Eastern Conference Semifinal matchup between the Rangers and the Boston Bruins; an elimination game where the Rangers must win. Rangers head coach John Tortorella not starting an integral member of his team with the club on the brink of playoff elimination might seem like a huge mistake, it might read as pomposity or arrogance or outright suicidal stupidity on John's part (and everyone knows gruff Tortorella is stubborn, win or lose). The thing is, he's done it before, and it nearly paid off too. Just a few miles from where the Rangers and Bruins will play tonight was where it took place; what was known as Continental Airlines Arena in the swamps of Jersey. Ten years ago, the Tampa Bay Lightning was playing game 5 of their own Eastern Conference Semifinal series against the New Jersey Devils and trailed 3 games to 1. It wasn't Brad Richards scratched from that affair, or Martin St. Louis, or Vincent Lecavalier, nor Fredrik Modin, Dave Andreychuk, Tim Taylor, Dan Boyle or Pavel Kubina. It wasn't one of the Bolts skaters who were sitting. No, it was goalie Nikolai Khabibulin who was assigned the backup role behind the guy who had backed him up most of the season, John Grahame. It didn't prevent elimination of the Lightning by the Devils, the eventual Stanley Cup Champions of 2003, but the Bolts (and Grahame especially) fought tooth and nail to stave off inevitability. That game went to overtime, that game went beyond overtime... It wasn't until 11:12 of the third overtime that Grahame faltered and the Lightning ultimately conceded the series. Grahame made 46 saves on 48 shots during that marathon, arguably playing the game of his career in the process. It was a Tortorella gamble for sure; as Khabby was the all-world netminder the Lightning had obtained in late 2001. Khabibulin was the workhorse for the club, playing in 135 of 164 games over the course of his first two full seasons in Tampa. And to have him sit out game 5? Unspeakable, unheard of. Of course he didn't like it... But it happened. And of course fans questioned John Tortorella's decision, but the team was 5-5 in the playoffs (having swept the Washington Capitals in the first round) and Khabibulin needed to raise his game (he had a .913 save percentage and 2.42 GAA in the NHL playoffs). Perhaps Tortorella's message was longer-term and not simply trying to prolong the series against the Devils; players would have to perform above and beyond in crucial situations or all was for naught. Mediocrity is unacceptable and playing it safe is death. The Lightning would heed that message next season, pushing all the way to Stanley Cup glory. Torts might not be afforded the chance to make this a long-term message (if it is one) for the Rangers roster. With an underwhelming offense during the regular and post-season, Torts is already on the hot seat among Ranger fans and possibly team execs too. This isn't an unheard of move by Tortorella though. What it does for the Rangers tonight will be determined after the puck drops at Madison Square Garden.

The Syracuse Crunch will face the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton Penguins in the Eastern Conference Final of the Calder Cup Playoffs. The Crunch's third round matchup was determined after the Penguins defeated the Providence Bruins tonight in Game 7 of ...

The Lightning, it is believed, has a potential goaltending star in Andrey Vasilevskiy. And head amateur scout Al Murray did nothing to change anyone's mind in a recent discussion about the 18-year-old Russian.

The Wilkes-Barre/Scranton Penguins shut out the Providence Bruins Wednesday night in Providence, with a final score of 5-0. This means WBS advances to the next round of the Calder Cup playoffs where they will face the Syracuse Crunch. The Crunch have home ice against the Pens, so the 2013 Eastern Conference Finals will start this Saturday, May 25th in Syracuse. The Providence Bruins (the #1 seed) elimination has also ensured home ice advantage for the Crunch in the Calder Cup Finals, should they advance. The dates for the round three series vs. the Baby Penguins are as follows: Eastern Conference Finals - Series "M": 2-2-1-1-1 format 3-Syracuse Crunch vs. 5-Wilkes-Barre/Scranton Penguins Game 1 - Sat., May 25 - W-B/Scranton at Syracuse, 7 ET Game 2 - Sun., May 26 - W-B/Scranton at Syracuse, 7 ET Game 3 - Wed., May 29 - Syracuse at W-B/Scranton, 7:05 ET Game 4 - Fri., May 31 - Syracuse at W-B/Scranton, 7:05 ET *Game 5 - Sat., June 1 - W-B/Scranton at Syracuse, 7 ET *Game 6 - Mon., June 3 - Syracuse at W-B/Scranton, 7:05 ET *Game 7 - Wed., June 5 - W-B/Scranton at Syracuse, 7 ET *If necessary The Crunch were 5-3 vs. WBS during the regular season. Other than that, this series will have some interesting storylines running in the background. Trevor Smith, a former Norfolk Admiral, won the Calder Cup with many of the Crunch's current guys last year. He now plays for WBS and had a role in their historic comeback. Chad Kolarik also plays for WBS, as does Riley Holzapfel. Kolarik played for the Crunch during the Columbus years, while his brother, Tyler, also pulled on a Crunch jersey once. Holzapfel was a member of the Crunch during the Anaheim years. Both teams are coming into this series with some ego attached. WBS came all the way back from trailing Providence 3-0 to win the series, including game 7 on the road at Providence. That was a feat no other AHL team in history has ever achieved before them. The Crunch, however, have swept the first two playoff series, defeating Portland Pirates in three games and Springfield Falcons in four. In fact, the Crunch is the only undefeated team left in the 2013 Calder Cup Playoffs. The Crunch's series sweep against Springfield marked the Crunch's first four-game series sweep in franchise history. It also featured the Crunch's first post-season hat trick, potted by AHL regular-season MVP Tyler Johnson. Syracuse outscored the Falcons 18-7 in the second-round series, and outscored Portland 12-8 in their first-round series.

A couple of years ago, our former colleague on SB Nation highlighted the rapid decline of the Tampa Bay Lightning at the box office. James Mirtle, formerly of From The Rink and now at the Globe and Mail, showed the freefall (month to month) of the Bolts under the leadership of former owners OK (Not Really) Hockey. The 2007-08 season was a low point for the Lightning on the ice, but attendance was still quite strong in spite of that - the Lightning drew an average attendance of 18,692 for the season. That's 94.6 percent of the arena's then-capacity of 19,758. I make the comparison to 2007-08 because of the mire of this past season's team performance as well as the fact the Lightning were near-capacity at the Tampa Bay Times Forum for the duration of the 2013 season. Arena capacity is now 19,205 (having been reduced during the building renovation in 2011) and the season average attendance was 19,055, or 99.2 percent of building capacity. That was good enough to rank the Bolts 8th in the league in average home attendance. Since owner Jeff Vinik purchased the Lightning, attendance has rebounded as such: Season Attendance Average % of Capacity League rank 2010-2011* 17,268* 87.4* 18th 2011-2012 18,468 96.2 13th 2013 19,055 99.2 8th Average totals 18,264 94.2 13th *denotes arena capacity was 19758 at the time Of course, these numbers are the dubious "inflated" numbers of tickets sold - not turnstile, butts-in-seats attendance data. Another point to mention is that the franchise stopped reporting on the Forum going beyond sellout capacity. While the official capacity for the Forum is 19,205, the building's max capacity hovers likely somewhere above 21,000. What you can take from the chart leading into this story is a direct contrast to what James Mirtle was reporting in December 2009. The data, starting where Mirtle left off, shows the obvious growth trend and stabilization that's taken place after Vinik took control of the team on March 3rd, 2010. Is this a testament about solid ownership? Perhaps; perhaps it's an endorsement of how Leiweke, Steve Griggs and the rest of the executive staff under Vinik run the business and inspire fan investment through attending games. Perhaps it's a vote of confidence in the stewardship of the hockey team under GM Steve Yzerman? I'd like to think it's more likely a positive reflection on Tampa Bay as a hockey market. The OK Hockey era of mismanagement and other bad memories tied to it was an anomaly, an aberration, for the overall welfare of the sport of hockey and the NHL in Tampa Bay.

It's been almost two months. The AHL regular season waned and ended for the Syracuse Crunch and seven playoff games are now in the can. Over that time span, Cedrick Desjardins has become not just the starter for the Syracuse Crunch but the workhorse and last resort. While he has Pat Nagle backing him up in net, Nagle has not seen much playing time at all - 97 minutes during the regular season, posting a 3.70 GAA and a .875 save percentage. Indeed, it's been almost two months... But news started spreading Monday and then continued Tuesday that goalie Riku Helenius should be making his North American return in the immediate future. Helenius, 25, has been playing his first season in North America since 2009-10. His stats have mirrored the sub-par efforts by goalies in the Tampa Bay Lightning organization in general this season (a 2.52 GAA and .900 save percentage), but Riku has been distracted (to say the least) by personal matters back in his native Finland. Before his departure from Syracuse on April 6th, Helenius had previously left the Crunch in mid December, likely to spend the holidays with his ailing mother. What kind of difference will Helenius' presence make for the Crunch in the playoffs? That's unknown. Perhaps it will just be a morale boost for the Crunch to have their teammate back with them? That's a powerful motivator. It really depends on Helenius' shape on his return and how he performs in practice. I expect Cedrick Desjardins to remain between the pipes for the Crunch regardless of Helenius' status... But Riku could end up serving as Desjardins backup again if he's in shape and shows that he is ready to return to playing. The Crunch finds out Wednesday night who they will face in the AHL's Eastern Conference Finals; the Providence Bruins face the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton Penguins in the decisive game 7.