What's Next for the Tampa Bay Lightning?

As the Tampa Bay Lightning come to terms with their first-round defeat at the hands of the Toronto Maple Leafs in the first round of this year’s Stanley Cup playoffs, one thing is clear: Bolts GM Julien BriseBois has some serious work to do this off-season.

In some ways, the Lightning were the better team against the Leafs, but their stunning success in the past three post-seasons looks like it has caught up with them. They’re not a team interested in a full-on roster rebuild, but they’re also not in a position to deepen their lineup. As per CapFriendly, BriseBois has only $2.4 million in cap space, and the Bolts have just 15 players under contract for the 2023-24 campaign.

Most notably, the Lightning have big decisions to make on a number of veterans who now are UFAs. 

Longtime key component winger Alex Killorn, pesky forward Corey Perry, depth forwards Pierre-Edouard Bellemare and Michael Eyssimont, and defenseman Ian Cole all are UFAs. Meanwhile, bottom-six forward Tanner Jeannot – for whom BriseBois handed over a small fortune in draft picks at the trade deadline – is an RFA. There is not nearly enough cap space to retain all of those players, even if the Bolts wanted to.

But the biggest area Tampa Bay should be addressing is their No. 2 goaltender position. In this year’s first-round loss to Toronto, star goalie Andrei Vasilevskiy looked like a man who had been carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders for the past few years and who is exhausted by the workload. 

Vasilevskiy didn’t have the benefit of playing behind an elite defense corps as he did in the years prior to this one, but Lightning coach Jon Cooper leaned on him heavily, appearing in 60 games before the playoffs began.

At the end of the road against the Leafs this year, it was clear veteran backup Brian Elliott was not a serious alternative to spell off Vasilevskiy if need be. The 38-year-old Elliott, who posted a subpar season that included a 3.40 goals-against average and .891 save percentage, is now a UFA as well, and he’s likely not coming back for the 2023-24 season. The Bolts have 21-year-old rookie Hugo Alnefelt in their system, but he doesn’t seem like the ideal choice for a team that’s built to win now.

An alternative option might be a UFA veteran willing to take a smaller salary in return for being part of a clear playoff contender; someone such as the well-travelled Cam Talbot, James Reimer or Joonas Korpisalo could turn out to be a solid fit. 

There doesn’t have to be a pure 50/50 tandem split in net for Tampa, as Vasilevskiy is still only 28 years old and likely has a lot of good hockey ahead of him. But adding an experienced hand who can play 30 games or more would allow Vasilevskiy to be fresher come playoff time than he was against Toronto this year.

Whatever the case, it looks like BriseBois has difficult choices to make this summer. Tampa Bay is not going on a massive rebuild, but their cap situation dictates they can’t add the depth necessary to outlast an opponent, like the depth Toronto had to depend on in the first round. All elite teams are eventually forced to reckon with the restrictions the cap puts on them. That process began for Tampa this past year with the departures of veterans Ryan McDonagh and Ondrej Palat.

It’ll be even more difficult to retain Killorn and one or two other veterans without depleting some other part of the roster. And with Ottawa, Buffalo and Detroit all likely to be improved next year, the Lightning will find themselves in a much more competitive Atlantic Division and Eastern Conference. It might only be a situation in which the Bolts win five or six fewer games but wind up in a desperate fight just to land a wild-card berth.

That said, the Lightning might still prove to be a tough opponent to knock out of the playoffs next year. Vasilevskiy could return to form, and Tampa Bay’s core forwards could be asked to carry more of the load than they’ve done of late. But this feels like a team that’s now dealing with the law of diminished returns. 

It’s crazy to think a team could look so dominant one year and then almost fall off the competitive map one year later. Still, all the Bolts have to do to see that can happen is look at their cross-state arch-rival Florida Panthers, who won the Presidents’ Trophy last season as the NHL’s top team, and just barely made the playoffs this year.

There’s still lots to like about the Lightning. But there are many more questions surrounding them this off-season, and the answers may not be to their liking.