Feaster Not Sexy Enough for Tampa Bay

The new Tampa Bay Lightning are all about sex appeal. Take a look at that fat bearded man holding the Stanley cup and it quite obvious that he did not fit into their plans.

Since Len Barrie and Oren Koules have taken over the team they have made some rather peculiar moves, most of which have involved a lot of sizzle, but very little steak.

It is blatantly obvious that Jay Feaster had not been calling the shots for a couple months now. The new owners’ first order of business was to bring in Barry Melrose as head coach to replace John Tortorella. Clearly not Feaster’s choice. Nothing but a PR move in hiring a guy who is a well-known television personality in the United States but hasn’t coached a game in the NHL since Alf was popular.

Their next move was to go balls out on free agents, signing any forward with any kind of a scoring touch that they could get their hands on, including a couple washed up has-beens. Is this a move that will get the fans excited and maybe sell a few more tickets? Yes. Is this a move that will make the Lightning a contender? Hell no.

The Tampa Bay Lightning now have 18 forwards under contract, almost all of them of NHL calibre. Their cap hit on forwards alone is almost $37 million. Meanwhile they have one of the weakest back ends in the entire league.

The Lightning then proceeded to trade away Dan Boyle, who Feaster had just signed to a big multi-year contract last season. Boyle was the top defenseman on a team that struggled like crazy in their own end. While Boyle is not exactly a defensive stalwart, Feaster clearly understood his importance to the team.

At this point, there was no doubt that Feaster, the man who brought Tampa Bay a Stanley Cup, was being phased out. But the writing was actually on the wall a few weeks earlier when the Lightning hired Brian Lawton as their VP of Hockey operations just a week before free agency began. Lawton is a former player agent who recently quit the business to pursue his dreams of becoming an NHL GM. Lawton had interviewed for the vacant GM job in Vancouver before they decided to hire Mike Gillis instead.

Feaster confirmed that he had indeed been phased out when he released the following statement:

"For the past two weeks I have watched from the sidelines as Brian Lawton, Len Barrie and Oren Koules executed to perfection the game-plan they shared with us prior to the NHL Draft in Ottawa. During that time it became apparent to me that this new ownership group did not need my advice or expertise, and I came to the conclusion that it was time to move on. When I expressed that sentiment to Oren and Len they immediately agreed to honor my contract and accept my resignation. I thank them for working with me through a difficult time and I wish them every continued success."

With Lawton clearly in charge, this brings about an interesting question for Canucks fans. If he was the one who made all those deals to get more offensive power in TB, would he have been a better hire in Vancouver than Gillis? Vancouver clearly still needs offensive help. The only issue in Tampa Bay is that offence was not exactly their problem in the first place.

It is bizarre that the new owners did not release Feaster before the draft or at least before free agency began but pretty much everything they have done so far has been ass-backwards.

Moving forward, it will be interesting to see what else the Tampa Bay Lightning do. I predict that it will still be a whole lot of losing, but at least they will be doing it in style.