Fourteen points in 17 games.
That was the argument Jonathan Drouin made in the 2015-16 NHL playoffs a year ago when he helped carry the Tampa Bay Lightning within one win of a second consecutive Stanley Cup Final appearance. With Steven Stamkos on the shelf for most of the season and seemingly headed toward free agency, Drouin was forced to step in and step up his game.
He did. And after a season of tumult, trade requests, and tension between Lightning GM Steve Yzerman and his young winger, both seemed committed to a future together:
"I definitely want to be here," Drouin said. "I love the way this ended, I guess with this different and weird year. But the way this finished and it's definitely somewhere I want to play."
...
"He makes us a better team, it's as simple as that," Yzerman said. "What he showed me, I think the best thing for this team right now is Jonathan Drouin on it."
A year later, Yzerman traded Drouin to the Montreal Canadiens instead of giving him a long-term contract extension.
Which begs the question: Were both of them just saying the right things back then, or did they really mean it? And if the former, what happened to force this move?
There’s a couple of answers to that, but it all comes down to one equation:
Changes = New Circumstances + New Priorities + Time
Let’s break each of these down.
New circumstances
The new circumstances arose as soon as Steven Stamkos signed a new eight-year deal last June. That $8.5 million cap hit added to Tampa Bay’s books, with a plethora of good UFA and RFAs coming up the following summer, always meant hard decisions would need to be made. It was just a matter of who would play their way into new contracts.
Tyler Johnson and Ondrej Palat both did that. Johnson, in particular, could command at least $5 million per season. Tampa Bay wants to keep both and will need to erase a good chunk of its $17 million in cap space to do so.
At the same time, Nikita Kucherov emerged as a bonafide star and a right winger the Lightning can build around for years. At the moment, he’s massively underpaid at $4.766 million per year. The Lightning need to think about what it will take to keep him when that expires and he’s due for a raise in 2019-20.
For that, they’ll need space now to keep Johnson and Palat and space then to keep all three. The contract Drouin signed with Montreal (six years, $5.5 million per year) would’ve made those plans difficult.
New priorities
As the season rolled along in Tampa, it became abundantly clear the Lightning lacked depth or promise on the blue line. They were top-heavy; Victor Hedman and Anton Stralman make up an envious top pairing, but nothing coming up the pipeline inspires any confidence.
Kucherov’s breakout year and good debuts from Brayden Point and Adam Erne prove the Lightning are well-positioned for years up front. But they needed a strong two-way defender to keep their playoff window open that much more.
Prying Mikhail Sergachev from Montreal was a coup. He is a blue-chip defenseman and will, in all likelihood, be a terrific addition for years to come in Tampa Bay. It was just a matter of figuring out which forward to cut loose to get him.
That’s where the final part of the equation came in.
Time
They say it heals all wounds, but Drouin’s trade request saga last season wasn’t going to fade into the past so easily.
The NHL (and hockey in general, really) is a league that you earn your way into. The sport’s culture values team-first play and work ethic. Your ice time is hard-fought for and not given based on your draft position or level of self-worth.
So, yes: Drouin was playing much better from 2013-16 than his bottom-six role would suggest. He was probably right in saying he deserved more minutes. And his play after Stamkos’ injury and well into the playoffs proved it. Circumstances earned trust in him from coach Jon Cooper, not his play.
But his actions had to rankle Yzerman deeply. When he was sent down to the AHL, he refused to report and requested a trade. You just don’t do that. Not in hockey. And even though he eventually withdrew the request, I imagine those self-serving actions cast a mark on him that sent Drouin to the top of the “pack your bags” pile when these hard roster decisions needed to be made. Regardless of how well he had played.
I think it’s easy for fans to assume that a player and his team can patch up differences if the player is contributing at a high level. It just makes sense logically, right? You want the best players possible. And if that player happens to be 22 years old, surely those bygones must be left as bygones.
Not always. These are people, after all, and people tend to have long memories. After the tension of last season, maybe the clock was always running out on Jonathan Drouin’s future in Tampa Bay. A year of changed priorities and circumstances only hastened that inevitability.