Bolts prepared to defend Stanley Cup on short rest

The Tampa Bay Lightning’s quest to repeat as Stanley Cup champions begins Wednesday when the Bolts host the Chicago Blackhawks at AMALIE Arena to start the 2020-21 regular season.

The Stanley Cup will be in the building.

The Lightning will unveil their Stanley Cup championship banner prior to the game.

And then the Lightning will go right back to work trying to win the Cup that eluded them for so many seasons all over again.

What’s their motivation this time around?

“Once you taste champagne out of the Stanley Cup, you want to do it again,” Bolts head coach Jon Cooper quipped.

Video: Jon Cooper | 1.12.21

The Lightning haven’t had much time to taste that sweet elixir flowing out of hockey’s holy grail since winning it September 28 following a 2-0 shutout of the Dallas Stars in Game 6 of the Stanley Cup Final.

COVID-19 restrictions kept the players, coaches and staff from taking the Cup out of the country or to their hometowns for their days with it. Some were able to have their days in Tampa – parading the Cup around the waters of Tampa Bay seemed to be a popular choice – while others are still waiting.

Then the next season came together quickly.

December 20, the National Hockey League in conjunction with the NHL Players Association announced an agreement had been reached to play a 56-game regular season in 2020-21, teams realigned into divisions based on location to minimize travel, the Lightning in the Central Division along with the recently vanquished Stars, Wednesday’s opponent Chicago, Carolina, Columbus, Detroit, Florida and Nashville.

Training camp would begin January 3 with the season starting 10 days later.

The abbreviated camp didn’t give teams much time to prepare, particularly with preseason games not allowed and only a couple of intrasquad scrimmages to replicate competitive situations.

“It’s gone quick, no doubt,” McDonagh said of the shorter-than-usual training camp. “I mean, you talk about a couple practices and you’re right into intrasquad, a day off and then the same thing again and here we are one day away. So, it has happened quick, especially with our team, we try to be pretty detailed and all in sync so we’re trying to cover all different types of scenarios, all the situations around the ice. Normally, you’d get three or four days to work on one aspect. Here we’re trying to bunch it all together.”

The Lightning are more fortunate than others, however. The Bolts bring most everybody back from the team that lifted the Cup a few months earlier. Only Kevin Shattenkirk (signed with Anaheim), Carter Verhaeghe (signed with Florida), Braydon Coburn (traded to Ottawa) and Cedric Paquette (traded to Ottawa) are gone.

The Bolts added a couple new players. Forward Boo Nieves was brought in on a PTO and earned a one-year, two-way contract. He’ll be on the roster for Opening Night. So too will defenseman Andreas Borgman, who signed as a free agent in October. Cal Foote was Tampa Bay’s First Round draft selection (14th overall) in 2017 and will make his NHL debut Wednesday (Tyler Johnson and Luke Schenn are not eligible to play Opening Night after being placed on waivers and clearing Tuesday but will return to the main roster Thursday).

“By the time we get through (Wednesday’s) pre-game skate, we’ll have pretty much touched on everything we need to,” head coach Jon Cooper said of his team’s preparation for the upcoming season. “Now it just comes into reps and you refine your game as the season goes. But pretty fortunate to have a lot of the same players back, so the language wasn’t foreign to them. Hopefully that bodes well for us tomorrow.”

Video: Ryan McDonagh | 1.12.21

The Lightning, along with the Stars, also have the benefit of having played the last game in the NHL. Teams who didn’t qualify for the 2020 Playoffs have gone over 10 months without playing a competitive game.

Plus, the Lightning had a process the entire team bought into during the playoffs that enabled them to lift the Cup and do it in dominant fashion, rolling through the postseason with an 18-7 record, never losing back-to-back games and never going more than six games in any series. They can draw on that process and that feeling of how well they played when everybody was performing their role to carry them into the upcoming season.

“We can’t forget how much sacrifice, how much preparation, how much hard work goes into that too,” McDonagh said. “We can say we had the recipe last year, but we worked extremely hard and everybody really bought in and was really disciplined in our play. We’re going to need that right from the start again. With the shortened season, we can’t allow ourselves to sit around here and wait for it to happen 15, 20 games in. I think our group understands that we’ve got to find a way to pull for one another, set ourselves up out there and just continue to pull in one direction.”

McDonagh is beginning his 11th season in the NHL and third full season with the Lightning. He was asked if he still gets nervous before Opening Night.

“You don’t take it for granted, especially at this stage of your career,” he answered. “We’re very thankful to be playing in the NHL and obviously it’s a very exciting time for us too as a team to approach a new challenge. We’re defending our title. It all starts tomorrow. We know it’s not going to be a recipe made overnight. It’s going to be a process. There’s going to be ups and downs. I think our group is anxious to get the ball rolling here with game one.”