[Times photo: Dirk Shadd]
Goalie Nikolai Krabibulin and Boston's P.J. Axelsson get tangled up at the goal Friday night.
TAMPA - Well, hello there, Cory Stillman.
Darned glad to meet you.
Talk about your good first impressions. Cory Stillman walked into the building as a stranger Friday night and by the time the game ended he was everybody's new best buddy.
This is how you say hello, all right. You grin a little, you shake a few hands and you start dumping pucks into the back of the net like a guy flipping cards into a hat. You excite your new fans. You relax your new teammates. You make the coach look smarter and the general manager look shrewder and the doubts seem smaller.
Welcome to town, Cory.
Looks like you're going to fit in just fine.
Oh, it was nice enough to see the Lightning back at it again. The boys unwrapped a new season against Boston, and it was good to see Nikolai Khabibulin look sharp again and good to see Brad Richards look dangerous again and good to see the Lightning simply drub Boston 5-1.
The best sight of all, however, was Stillman. This was the new kid in town making you forget about the old guy who left.
You remember Vinny Prospal, don't you? Prospal was a nice player for the Lightning last season, an excellent playmaker who led the team in scoring, and it would have been great for the Lightning to have re-signed him.
Somehow, however, Prospal seemed to gain even more stature when he left for Anaheim in the offseason. Somewhere, on his cross-country flight, Prospal turned into Wayne Gretzky. It was as if his absence was sufficient enough reason to doubt the Lightning.
That left the rest of us looking at Stillman and measuring all the ways he wasn't Prospal. If you wanted to doubt, there was a club forming.
Can you imagine what the next few weeks might have been like for Stillman if he had gotten off to a slow start and Prospal a quick one, rather than the other way around? The shadow over Stillman would have grown every day and the eyes would have rolled over the team's inability to find replacement parts.
Officially, those doubts died 114 seconds into the season. That was when Stillman neatly poked his first goal into the net - the fastest goal into a season of any the Lightning has played. Stillman would later add a second goal and an assist, and by the way, what was Prospal's first name again?
If you're measuring opening lines, that was good enough. If you're measuring symbolism, that was even better. Stillman's game was a statement that, hey, this team is going to be all right.
"There were some expectations on him, and he answered them," defenseman Brad Lukowich said. "When you go to a new club, even a veteran club, there are lot of eyes on you. It was a good way for him to start."
Everyone seemed pretty much impressed with Stillman except, well, for Stillman, who acted as if it were just another practice drill.
"It was nice to score quickly," Stillman said. "I'm going to score some more."
If you look at Stillman's career, that seems obvious. He has scored 20 or more goals in five of his last six seasons. Still, the Blues looked at Stillman as if something were missing. There was a knock on his consistency; that there were times he couldn't be found.
Stillman comes to Tampa Bay with a chance to change all of that. For him, this is a chance to join a hard-working, playoff-tested team on the run. He can be, yippee, reinforcements.
That's different than the old days, when players came here because it was the last outpost and every place else had banished them.
For Stillman, this is a nice opportunity. In St. Louis, he was a supporting player and the Blues tried as hard as they could to give him away during last season's draft so they could shove more money at Pavol Demitra.
It was during the first round of the draft last season that general manager Jay Feaster's phone rang. The Blues were on the line and they were willing to give up Stillman for the Lightning's first-round draft pick, even considering how late in the round it was. No thanks, said Feaster.
Not long after, the phone rang again. How about the first of the Lightning's second-round picks? No thanks, said Feaster.
Then it rang again. How about the second of the second-round picks? Again, Feaster said no.
Finally, the phone rang again. The Lightning had three second-rounders. How about the third of them? Oh, okay, Feaster said. Why not? It would be good insurance in case the team lost Prospal.
After Friday night, it looked like more than that. No, Stillman isn't going to be the flashiest player on the ice. He describes himself as "a give-and-go hockey player," one of those find-the-open-ice sort of players who has a knack for the net.
One game in, 81 to go, and it looks as though there is plenty of need for another one of those around here.
So hello again to a hockey team. And hello to the new kid in town.
