As the winningest coach in the history of the Tampa Bay Lightning, Jon Cooper has proof of that success resting on a shelf behind his desk in his office at home in Tampa.
There stand miniature replicas of the President’s Cup the Lightning won as regular season champions last season and the Prince of Wales Trophy the Bolts claimed in his second full season in 2015, the year they lost to Chicago in the NHL final.
The one that’s missing is the Stanley Cup.
This might have been the year Cooper reached hockey’s his ultimate achievement and nobody’s saying for sure that dream is dead, but for the real contenders for the crown the hour is getting late to restart to what might be a lost season.
COVID-19 is wreaking unimaginable devastation on the world, which has cast doubt that sports of any kind will be played over the next few months. For Cooper and the Lightning, it all came to a screeching halt on Friday, March 13, when the NHL paused its season. That sudden stop and the empty feeling of unfinished business felt eerily like a year ago when the Lightning, on the heels of a record 62-win season, were dealt s stunning first-round playoff sweep by the Columbus Blue Jackets.
“The feeling when we lost out and the feeling in the days after the season got paused, there were definitely some similarities,” said Cooper. “One day you’re going to work to play the Philadelphia Flyers and the next thing you know you’re sent home, the season’s on pause and then everybody can’t be around each other. That’s kind of how we felt after we lost to Columbus.
“Ýou’re just knocked right out of your routine. I guess there was less uncertainty getting knocked out of the playoffs; you know you’re out and you have all the stuff you have to prepare for the summer. This is different in the sense that there’s just zero answers of what’s going to happen. There’s still that hope we’ll get to play.”
With 12 games still left on the schedule, Tampa (43-21-6) is tied with Colorado for third overall in the NHL, eight points behind the Atlantic Division-leading Boston Bruins. Cooper knows how hard it is to remain competitive in the league and how easy it is to fall, as last year’s playoffs proved when seven of the top 10 teams were wiped out in the opening round.
“It’s pretty easy to get the guys focused when you go out like that,” Cooper said. “I think the guys came in with the right mindset, of wanting to improve on what we did last year, not necessarily saying we had to set all these records as we did in the regular season but make ourselves a better playoff-ready team.”
Part of that was a commitment to better team defence and protecting leads, which led to a team-record 11-game winning streak in January-February.
“A lot of times last year we played the game to outscore teams and had to rely on our goalie to bail us out in games where this year there’s been a lot of games where we just outdefended teams,” said Cooper.
“That took us about 30-plus games for it to start clicking because there were some habits to break in some players,” he said. “But when it started to roll for us, between games 30 and 65, we really played some good hockey.
“We were really looking forward to seeing what we could do in the playoffs. Hopefully that’s still something we get to see.”
Cooper says the Lightning are fortunate in the fact almost all of the players live in the Tampa area, where they can continue the same outdoor conditioning regimens they follow throughout the winter and prepare for the day when hockey eventually resumes. Very few teams have that advantage and the players are now time zones apart from each other.
“They can’t use the arena facility so they have makeshift gyms and it’s probably the most strenuous on the strength coaches, because they’re the ones who have to try to keep these guys in relatively good shape,” said Cooper. “It’s funny, the guys in their workouts, that’s probably something they don’t look forward to in the year, but now it’s the highlight of their day.”
Cooper’s NHL career started the day he was called up to Tampa from Syracuse to replace the fired Guy Boucher with a month left in the 2012-13 season, having won championships at every level he’d coached (NAHL, USHL, AHL) since making a career switch from lawyer to hockey coach.
“When you first get in the league, you’re in survival mode,” Cooper said. “You’re hoping what you’ve learned on your way up to the NHL, you just stay with those principals, but there’s so much so going on and you’re just trying to keep your head out of the water. Fortunately for me I got to come up for those 14 or 15 games at the end of the year and go through the summer and prepare, and that was a big help to me.
“I’ve seen the game change. It was a bit more slow-paced and played differently than it is now. The rule changes have really opened the game up but the big thing is how all the defencemen can skate now. We used to have maybe one or two that was your offensive guy and now I feel like everybody can skate, there’s not a big lugging defenceman that’s going to chop you down. Those guys, unless you can skate, they’re not much in the game now.”
Cooper ranks 45thin the NHL with 347 career wins through 577 games and his .601 winning percentage is No. 1 among the top 100 coaches on the all-time list. In seven full seasons, aside from missing the playoffs in 2018, Cooper has never finished worse than second in the Atlantic. After losing to the Blackhawks in a six-game final in 2015 the Lightning have twice advanced to the Eastern Conference final, losing seven-games series to the eventual Stanley Cup champions (2016, Pittsburgh; 2018, Washington) each time.
“It’s rare that you get to just pop right in and win a Stanley Cup, there’s a lot of coaches that pay their dues before they win,” he said. “You just don’t know when your chance is going to be. You have to keep knocking at the door and hopefully at some point you can just barge right in.”
In 2018-19, the year Tampa won the President’s Cup, Cooper became only the second coach in NHL history to record 60 wins in a season. The other is Scotty Bowman, who did it with Montreal and Detroit.
Bowman lives in Florida and a couple months ago gave Cooper an autographed copy of his book, Scotty, A Hockey Life, written by former Habs goalie Ken Dryden, and Cooper has been taking advantage of his downtime this week to read it. He’s become an avid bike rider and spends time with his kids throwing the lacrosse ball around when they need a break from learning their school lessons online.
Cooper and his wife Jessie have three kids – 11-year-old twin daughters Julia and Josephine and a nine-year-old son, Jonny. His daughters are competitive swimmers, just like Cooper was when he used to race for the Prince George Barracudas Swim Club.
“I was right into it, I did that until I was 13 or 14, until lacrosse and hockey starting taking over,” said Cooper.
Jonny played hockey this season for the Tampa Bay Lightning squirt A team, coached by former Lightning players Vinny Lecavailer and Dan Girardi, both of whom have sons on the team. In the Florida state final in Orlando March 1they beat the Florida Panthers 3-2 in overtime. Jonny scored the winner and Cooper was there in the stands watching what he considers the most stressful game of his 52-year-old life.
“I remember being in the Stanley Cup final, coaching it, and I was more nervous in that overtime game watching my son than I’d been at any time coaching in a game myself,” he said. “It’s like helplessness.
“You have conflicted emotions because you don’t have anything to do with it,” said Cooper. “At least as a coach you can put out different lines or use different tactics but you have none of that. He’s family and your blood and you’re just cheering for them to have success.”
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