The Tampa Bay Lightning were one of the busiest teams this summer and after the success they had last season, fans there are getting a bit excited.
The Lightning re-signed Ryan Callahan, added Brian Boyle, Anton Stralman, and Evgeni Nabokov in free agency and traded for Jason Garrison. Throw prospect Jonathan Drouin into that mix and you’ve got a potentially loaded team. Just don’t tell coach Jon Cooper about that.
Cooper would like everyone to just take a breath and not get too excited as Joe Smith of the Tampa Bay Times shared.
“I’ve never seen a team, on paper, win the Stanley Cup,” Cooper said.
“We have to have the same work ethic we had last year, and I’m sure people are going to look at us with a little different expectation now that we’re a playoff team. But you want that challenge. We’re excited about that. But lets temper the expectations a little bit, and you look at how really inexperienced we are up front.”
The Lightning are young up front. From Steven Stamkos to Tyler Johnson to Ondrej Palat to Alex Killorn as well as adding Drouin, that’s a lot of players who haven’t seen a lot of NHL ice time.
That said, the talent is there for a team that finished second in the Atlantic Division behind the Boston Bruins. They’ll be challengers in the East, the question is how far can they go?