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.

Flames' New Headache

Todd Bertuzzi signing with the Calgary Flames is not a good fit. It isn’t a good fit for the player. It isn’t a good fit for the team

Bertuzzi’s game was on the decline even before he bashed in Steve Moore’s brains. Before the Moore incident, Bertuzzi was on pace that season for only around 70 points, nearly 30 short of the 97 he had recorded the season before. It has been all downhill since. Last year he managed only 40 points, and that is playing on a line with Corey Perry and Ryan Getzlaf for much of the season. Despite the fact that Bertuzzi will likely see ice time with Iginla in Calgary, the Flames lack a legitimate number one centre. Daymond Langkow certainly does not measure up to Getzlaf.

One thing Flames Fans will have to get used to is a lot more penalties, often at the most inopportune times. Even at his peak, Todd took many stupid penalties. When Todd was at his best, about half his penalties were because he was an aggressive, dominating power forward and the other half were because he would be lazy and not use his brain. Recently, half of his penalties are still because he can be lazy and dumb and the other half are simply because of his reputation for being a thug. Shall we go back to the 2006 Olympics? Guess who was in the penalty box in the third period of the gold medal game when Russia scored what would end up being the winning goal?

After spending last season with Anaheim, where hockey takes a back seat to several other sports, Bertuzzi will be returning to the country where hockey is king.

"I played my best hockey in Canada when I was under the microscope, and that may
be a little kick-start to get it going again," said Bertuzzi.

While it is certainly true that he had his most productive years in Vancouver, he was far from someone who thrived in the spotlight. Todd played his best hockey in Vancouver when expectations for both him and the team were low. He burst on to the scene from relative obscurity when the team was in the shitter to become one of the games premiere power forwards and then slowly fizzled out as the spotlight intensified. After establishing himself as a first-liner, Todd only managed to lead the team to one playoff round victory in five years. He was rarely the one to bring his A-game when the team needed him most. And let’s not forget his last season in Vancouver in which the Canucks lost 6 of the last 8 games to miss out on a playoff spot. Todd hated the media with a passion and it has always been obvious that he is not one who craves to be the center of attention, especially when things are not going his way.

Media scrutiny aside, it is mind boggling that Bertuzzi would want to return to play in the Northwest division. Fans on the road are going to be all over him like flies on shit. Is he some kind of glutton for punishment that he really wants to play Minnesota, Vancouver and Colorado six times each season? Minnesota was the original city to start booing Todd back when the Wild knocked the Canucks out of the playoffs in 2003 and they have certainly not warmed to him since. It doesn’t need to be explained why he will forever be hated in Colorado. And now that he is playing for one of Vancouver’s biggest rivals, Canuck fans will no longer have any sympathy for him. It is going to be a rough ride all season long.

An ideal situation would have been a place like Atlanta where he could have finished out his career in relative obscurity and still made enough money to pay off his legal fees. Or how about Tampa Bay? They seem to be handing out contracts like candy and he would be completely lost in the shuffle there with the 19 other new forwards joining the team.

I am not even going to get into Bertuzzi’s numerous injuries over the last few seasons or his ongoing legal troubles, which are still years from conclusion. Needless to say, signing Todd was a gamble and it is not one that I see working out for Darryl Sutter and the Flames.