Lightning must get better ... immediately

Lightning GM Jay Feaster hopes to trade the No. 4 overall draft pick.

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By GARY SHELTON, Times Sports Columnist

© St. Petersburg Times
published June 21, 2002

Sad to say, no bushes were burning.

The shape of the Stanley Cup had not appeared on the glass windows. There were no voices from the scoreboard whispering "...Ease his pain." Money was not falling from the sky. Or from Detroit, for that matter.

And still, we look for a sign.

That's the way hockey goes in Tampa Bay. Lightning fans, a remarkably resilient lot, gather each June to look for signs that next season will be different. And if not, how does the season after next look? The season after that?

In Detroit, fans throw octopi. In Philly, they heckle. In Tampa Bay, they wait for Godot and hope, if he ever shows up, he has a good slap shot.

Want a stat? Since the Lightning's last playoff game, April27, 1996, the NHL has bravely gone on to play 456 playoff games without it. Four-hundred fifty-six. That's a lot of time for a franchise to spend in the penalty box.

Frankly, it's time the waiting stopped. It's time the patience ran out.

It's time the Lightning became a playoff team.

This no longer is an expansion team. This no longer is a team under new ownership. This is merely a team that has not measured up or ponied up.

If you are satisfied because the team has showed increments of improvement during the past four seasons, inch by inch, like Sergei Bubka setting a pole vault record, it is time you raised your standards.

"It is time," Lightning general manager Jay Feaster said. "No longer is this a matter of building a young stable of players. We've had too many next years we've asked our fans to wait for. One playoff in 10 years is getting old and tiring."

Beginning with this weekend's draft, the Lightning can begin to change its image. It will require more money from ownership. It will require more creativity from management.

But if your business is professional hockey, six seasons out of the postseason (tied with the Flames for the league's longest drought) is long enough.

Say this much for the Lightning. For a change, it is close enough to dream. For the previous five Junes, you haven't been able to say that.

For a very long time, this has been a team of castoffs, leftovers in which most of the players were either too old or too young to be taken seriously. It didn't really matter if the Lightning kept its pick or traded it, whether it signed this free agent or that, whether the coach was fired or given an extension.

No matter. The team still knew vacation began the day after the final regular-season game.

Six seasons. Three owners, three general managers, five coaches and a bad fax machine. In a league that allows 16 of its 30 teams into the playoffs, that's saying something. Or, more precisely, nothing.

This season, however, there is a chance to reshape the image of the franchise. There is a nice nucleus with Nikolai Khabibulin, Brad Richards, Fredrik Modin and Vinny Lecavalier, provided Vinny can find common ground with coach John Tortorella before they end up on celebrity boxing.

The Lightning doesn't need that much to be a playoff-level team, really. A wing. A defenseman. Neither must be superstars. Both have to be solid players who are beyond learning on the job. Both have to help nudge a team that lost 19 games by one goal a little further along.

So far this offseason, the Lightning has shown a couple of small indicators that seem promising. The team signed Martin St. Louis. It finally delivered Alexander Svitov, yesterday's tomorrow. And the team seems committed to shopping the fourth overall pick.

Normally, it's bad business when a bad team trades away a high draft pick. Not this time. For the Lightning, this is the first draft in a very long time that isn't about five seasons from now.

We've seen enough kids grinning through braces on a podium while some announcer compares them with this legend or that one. I'd prefer to see the Lightning do something about now.

Frankly, the best sign this team could give its fans is to trade the pick for a veteran. (The right one, of course.) That would signify the Lightning, finally, is a team in the present tense.

Know this. Feaster wants to trade this pick. If he stands up and announces a young player's name with the fourth pick, it will be only because the trade offers didn't measure up.

Of course, it doesn't just start at the pick. It starts at Bill Davidson's wallet. To get this team up to professional standards, it has to pay professional salaries.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. We've heard all the stories about all the money this team is losing despite a payroll that is roughly two-thirds of the league average. If it's that bad, then evidently, the owner is a much, much worse businessman than we have been led to believe. If it isn't, it's time to spend a little.

"It isn't that the owner isn't willing to spend it," Feaster said. "There have just been so many examples of people who spend it and don't spend it the right way. Then you not only have the projected losses, you have the extra money you spent on top of that.

"As the general manager, it's about credibility. Now it makes sense for us to spend the money."

Yes, it does. The bottom line is this. If you own the Lightning and you aren't satisfied with your profit, you have to ask yourself a question: How is it ever going to get any better?

Answer: It isn't. Not unless the team does.

This weekend sounds like a good time to begin, don't you think?

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