King Kaufman's Sports Daily
The Lightning bring the Stanley Cup to Florida, where it's likely to stay for a while as the NHL shuts down and Northern fans see red. Plus: That all-important second goal.
June 8, 2004 | You could say that the NHL got a kind of comeuppance when the Tampa Bay Lightning won the Stanley Cup Monday night.
With a lockout looming three months away and a long work stoppage almost a certainty, the trophy that means so much to Canadians and so little to Americans will belong not just to the States, but to that most un-icy of states, that Sunshine State, Florida. Forecast high in Tampa Tuesday: 89 degrees Fahrenheit, which is 32 degrees Celsius, for you Canadian readers.
It was a terrific, grinding game, the climax of the Calgary Flames' underdog charge to the Finals from the sixth seed in the Western Conference. The gritty Flames, almost always referred to as a "lunch-bucket team" in Canadian newspapers, carried the hopes of a nation to the doorstep, to within one win of bringing the Cup north of the border for the first time since 1993. But in the end they didn't have enough.
The checks weren't there, the jump was gone. Star Jarome Iginla couldn't get a shot for the second straight game. The Lightning's superior talent finally took over, and the Flames were forced to take penalties. Ruslan Fedotenko scored twice, and though a goal by Craig Conroy with 11:29 left made it interesting and led to a frantic finish, the Flames weren't able to get to overtime, where they would have had to hope for a break.
Brad Richards, with 12 goals and 14 assists in 23 games, won the Conn Smythe Trophy as the MVP of the entire playoff season. It could just as well have gone to goalie Nikolai Khabibulin, who had a 1.71 goals-against average and a .933 save percentage, and who preserved the win with an astounding third-period save on a rebound shot by Jordan Leopold. Forty-year-old Dave Andreychuk, you may have heard, finally got to lift the Cup after spending a record 164 years in the league without winning it.
This business of the Stanley Cup belonging to Florida for the foreseeable future is a comeuppance to the NHL because it's a consequence of a policy that went a long way toward putting the league in its dire financial and labor straits: aggressive expansion. The NHL had 21 teams for more than a decade after the four World Hockey Association teams were absorbed in 1979, but starting in 1991 with the San Jose Sharks, it spent the next decade adding nine new teams.
Clubs used expansion fees from the new teams to finance bigger and bigger player contracts. But now that the league has expanded to 30 teams and can't reasonably get any larger, that revenue source has dried up, and the owners -- who must have been fairly astute businesspeople in the first place to be able to afford to buy an NHL franchise -- have discovered the esoteric economic principle that it's poor planning to heat your house by burning the furniture.
Next page: Tampa's a hockey town now! Like Raleigh!
