[Sabre Rattling]Something Rotten in Tampa

[SabresBeat]

“We are going to get there. You can write that, I don’t [care] what you write. It is a guarantee. We

will

get in.”

 

 

-Tampa Bay’s coach John Tortorella

 

With his guarantee that his team will get in the playoffs, Tortorella has a smell coming off him. The smell of desperation, the kind of that is a mix of frustration and incompetence, not the good kind you want your team to display on the ice, but the bad kind you see on the frantic father running around on Christmas eve trying to find a Nintendo Wii. The fact is that Tampa is in a freefall. 4-8-0 in their last 12 and have gone from sitting atop the SE division to teetering on the edge of missing the playoffs. And even with a rather soft schedule down the homestretch (Carolina twice, Florida, Washington, and Atlanta), the playoffs are far from guaranteed, no matter what a coach says.

 

 

The fact that Torts came out and made the guarantee is almost admitting publically “I can’t think of any other way to motivate this team”. Tampa’s problems, however, stem from much more than just a coach who can’t motivate, its a GM who can’t build. Feaster basically inherited a rich crop of prospects who blossomed into a championship team with little tinkering. However, the lockout combined with an owner a little too drunk on from sipping from the Cup gave out three contracts which basically backed Tampa into a corner, making them a top heavy team with little or no cap room to come anywhere close to matching the depth they saw on their championship team. Tampa fans have gone from a presidents trophy and a cup to an eighth seed which was first round fodder for the Senators last year, to a team who doesn’t look like they will be going much further this season, if sniffing the post season at all. And while there is no denying the talent of their big three fowards, their deficiencies on D and in goal make the Sabres D look like the iron curtain.

 

 

Will the Lightning make the playoffs? Only time will tell. They are (suprisingly) only two points back of Atlanta for the division lead, though Carolina is only two points back of them with a game in hand. The two games versus the Canes will probably decide which of the two previous cup champions will make the playoffs. However, given the comments of Tortorella, my money is on the Canes to squeek in. The Canes have better coaching, depth, goaltending, and defense. And while the better team can still lose two games in a row to the worse team, with the way Tampa has been playing, Carolina should be a safe bet.

 

 

 

 

 

http://www.sabresreport.com/blogs/?p=455