What the teetering Islanders can learn from the Lightning’s stumbles and eventual Stanley Cups

Jon Cooper is leaning back in a chair at the desk in his office at Amalie Arena. It’s Saturday, and out on the ice, the Islanders are finishing up their morning skate ahead of a game they will lose, 5-3, to the Lightning. In here, Cooper, the Tampa Bay coach, is explaining the art of bouncing back.

“There’s perfect storms in winning,” Cooper told Post Sports+. “And there’s also perfect storms in losing.”

The room is packed with memories and memorabilia, but the two pictures to Cooper’s right, of him celebrating two Stanley Cup victories, stand out. Cooper has coached the Lightning since 2013-14, and he reached the mountaintop with back-to-back Cup wins in 2020 and 2021, losing in the final last year and in 2015. But that didn’t come without moments of doubt along the way. The Lightning missed the playoffs in the 2016-17 season, after having reached the Cup Final and the conference finals in the two seasons prior. That disappointment, and the recovery from it, is what we’re here to talk about, because it’s where Cooper sees a parallel between his team and the Islanders.

That year in Tampa, Steven Stamkos suffered a season-ending injury after just 17 games. Goaltender Ben Bishop didn’t play at all. Thirty-three players played 10 or more games.

Last year on Long Island, the Isles didn’t play a home game until Nov. 20. Then they suffered a COVID-19 outbreak, sidelining much of their lineup for another two weeks. It would take until the New Year before their lineup was completely healthy.

The Lightning missed the playoffs by a point in 2017, the Islanders by much more than that.

“They’ve been to two conference finals in a row waiting to get back and the perfect storm went against them, just like it did in 2016-17 for us,” Cooper said. “And then we ended up moving a bunch of players and we kinda reset our team, and then we took off again.”

That’s why this comparison is imperfect. Though the Lightning continued to build around a core that included Stamkos, Brayden Point, Nikita Kucherov, Alex Killorn and Andrei Vasilevskiy — players who are still there — they also added Yanni Gourde, Ryan Callahan, Ryan McDonagh and Anthony Cirelli, to name a few players, before or during the 2017-18 season. The Islanders didn’t add a single player to their top 12 forwards this past offseason, and acquired only Alexander Romanov to help on the back end.

In that sense, the better Tampa Bay parallel is to 2019, after the Lightning were shockingly swept out of the first round of the playoffs by Columbus and decided to keep their core together. That conversation between Cooper and general manager Julien BriseBois did happen, as it surely did between Islanders coach Lane Lambert and GM Lou Lamoriello. But it ended in the same place.

“I think that trickles down from your leadership,” Cooper said. “So you need to have a group that they gotta believe in each other. Leadership kicks in, guys who have been there. The Islanders have a lot of those guys. They kept the team together. They had belief in the team. I think the general manager and the coach had belief in the team, and I think if you don’t have that, then you don’t have anything. To me, that’s what the Islanders have.”

Following that second disappointment in 2019, Cooper looked inward to deliver the change that was needed. He felt there needed to be a higher degree of accountability, for himself and players, and that he had begun to let things slide during a 62-win regular season the year prior. He started benching players more readily, as Lambert has in sitting Josh Bailey in Tampa and Anthony Beauvillier in Florida this past weekend.

“What do players covet the most?” Cooper said. “On a personal level, they covet ice time. In the end, that’s what they covet. Take it away from them and it can change — it probably doesn’t change all the players, but it can change some players. And that’s probably one of the biggest things that you hold guys accountable.”

During a trip to Sweden early the next season, Cooper started to feel like things were different. The Lightning won twice against a hot Sabres team, and he felt they could win physically, with speed and with skill. At the trade deadline, they added Blake Coleman and Barclay Goodrow, bolstering their top six in a way that would drastically pay off.

The Islanders have not had that moment yet this season, and it’s not clear that they will. But the blueprint is there, and so is the belief. Even with a slow 3-5 start to the season that improved slightly after Wednesday’s 3-0 win over the Rangers, it is all in front of them.

“The best thing we did was we did not blow the team up,” Cooper said. “We knew inside, we had to change some things mentally in our game, in how we approach the game, how to close out games, and by losing in a horrific, crushing way, it ended up delivering that.”

He points to his right.

Five hits from Islanders 3, Rangers 0

1. The newest version of the first line, with Mathew Barzal centering Oliver Wahlstrom and Josh Bailey, had a successful night, with a 71.43 shot attempt percentage, per Natural Stat Trick, and Bailey getting his first goal of the year. Wahlstrom next to Barzal in particular was deemed promising by Lambert, who said “it looked like there was a little bit of something there.”

2. Wednesday night would have been Bailey’s 1,000th career game had he not sat on Saturday in Tampa. It’s a bit of a bummer that it wasn’t: It would have been a great moment for him to score at home against the Rangers as he hit a meaningful milestone of playing 1,000 career games all with the same organization — something that doesn’t happen often in the salary-cap era. Of course, it’s not Lambert’s job to consider that in his lineup decisions, but it is too bad Bailey will hit that mark on the road against Carolina instead of on Long Island.

3. A cool nine hits for Cal Clutterbuck and another night when the Identity Line looked good. Through seven games, it’s been the best forward line for the Islanders, though that designation is influenced by Lambert having changed up the top nine a good amount.

4. Five shots on net for Anthony Beauvillier following a healthy scratch in Florida. After a slow first period, Beauvillier played with energy and speed, the way Lambert wants him to, and it made an impact.

5. The Islanders’ power play didn’t score in three tries, but had stretches when it moved the puck crisply. The second unit in particular — with Ryan Pulock at the point — looked far better than it did over the weekend.

A bizarre end to the roster logjam

The news Wednesday that the Islanders waived Kieffer Bellows was easy to see coming in two ways:

1. He was the only roster forward not to play either weekend game in Florida, with Nikita Soshnikov and Ross Johnston both getting a chance.

2. It was not tenable for the Islanders to continue with just six defensemen on their roster, a scenario that invites trouble, for a three-game road trip across the Midwest next week.

Still, seeing Bellows, who was signed to a one-year, $1.2 million extension this past summer, hit waivers having only skated in one game this season, was not the scenario we would have predicted following training camp — where Bellows outplayed not only Johnston and Soshnikov, but also Wahlstrom. Lambert refused to give much of an explanation for why Bellows wasn’t playing, so it’s not clear why the Islanders viewed the 24-year-old power forward as expendable beyond his obvious lack of production (11 goals, 14 assists) over 68 career games with the club.

That would be an adequate explanation if it did not also apply to Johnston, whose game mostly limits him to the bottom six, or Soshnikov, who before this season had not played in the NHL since Nov. 2018.

Getting Bellows’ salary off the books clears more space than either of those options, but not by much (Johnston is ticketed at a $1.1 million AAV). And though we won’t know whether he has cleared waivers until Thursday afternoon, it is hard to see how Bellows was not the most likely of those three players to be claimed if put on waivers. He is the youngest, he is under team control next summer (unlike Soshnikov) and his deal does not represent a long-term commitment (unlike Johnston’s).

Perhaps Bellows will clear waivers, rendering this discussion moot. But it is certainly a risk that he won’t, making this is a hard move to make sense of.