Quote:
Originally Posted by Erick Estrada
It's not like the Lightning have unearthed some blueprint to winning in the playoffs. You can argue that the Lightning are unique in that the majority of teams missing their best forward for the entire regular season may miss the playoffs entirely. To the credit of that organization they built a roster so deep with talent that they could still cruise to home ice in the playoffs without that player. What happened to them this season isn't something that could be easily replicated by any other team so I don't think we have to worry about this being a big issue going forward.
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They were able to maintain a team with that much depth because they had Kucherov on LTIR for the entire season in a manner that is suspect at least. If you take that away the team is forced to make some really hard decisions on who they have to get rid of. It is interesting that the Blackhawks are being brought up because they had to get rid of a large number of players due to the cap and maintaining compliance. Byfuglien, Ladd, Versteeg, Teravainen and Niemi all had to be traded for cap compliance reasons at some point or another... if you didn't have to pay for Kane's salary for the season and just have him in the playoff they would still make it and be able to afford that depth.
Obviously strong management gets them to that point but the bending of the rules significantly allows them to stay at that point.