Pool Outlook for Tampa Bay

Last summer, the Lightning kept me and every other hockey writer, blogger and analyst busy with their maverick ways and the forecast for this summer looks to be a whole lot of the same. The Lightning currently hold the number two pick overall in the Entry Draft for June, but there are plenty of rumblings that suggest that they are going to make the whole draft interesting by possibly moving the pick for some more talent to help themselves out for the start of next season. If the 2009 season was anything to go by, all of the changes to the team didn't help overall production for the fantasy players, so we may not want to expect very much again this coming season.

It's the first season in a while that Vincent Lecavalier wasn't a top the pool rankings for the Lightning, but here we are, saying that Martin St. Louis took the top spot in Tampa with his 80-point season. St. Louis was only one of two players to play in all 82 games for the Lightning (Vaclav Prospal being the other), which kept his fantasy value rather high. 80 points in 82 GP put St. Louis in 24th in pool rankings, down only slightly from his 19th the year before. It was good to see that St. Louis was not affected by the tinkering that management/ownership had done through the year, which seemed to hurt a lot of other players.

It took a while to happen, but Steven Stamkos finally turned the jets on in the second half of the season, finishing the year with 23 goals and 23 assists, while being a healthy scratch 3 times during the year. The lack of ice-time at the beginning part of the season was really making everyone, likely including Stamkos himself, second-guess his jump to the NHL right away, but he calmed those fears down when the coaching change was made and he could relax. Stamkos seemed to be the only one up front who improved, as a lot of the other key forwards also took a bit of a dive in their production. Ryan Malone, Vaclav Prospal and Jeff Halpern all fell short of their previous year marks.

Without Dan Boyle on the blueline, there was little to no substance on the backend for the Lightning. Their top defender on the team at the end of the year was Lukas Krajicek, who finished with 19 points in 71 GP. That ranked him 103rd among defensemen, which leaves ample opportunity for every other team to have three defensemen in the top 100 before the Lighrning get their first one on the list. Cory Murphy joined the team in the mid-season, but only managed to play in 32 games, registering 16 points. Andrej Meszaros was also a bit of a disappointment after coming from Ottawa in the off-season. Meszaros only had 16 points in 52 GP in 2009.

Goaltending was certainly a concern for the Lightning as well, having used five goalies and still only managing to win 24 games. Mike Smith battled with post-concussion syndrome in the final weeks of the season, so the team was without their number one. Karri Ramo and Mike McKenna split the duties of number one, usually in the sense that if you won, you kept playing. Well, there was a lot of back-and-forth games for both goalies. Smith will likely get the shot as number one going into camp, saying that his post-concussion syndrome has passed.

2010 Season Outlook
Well, it could very well be the skeptic in me, but the outlook for the Lightning remains very foggy. With all the changes that the team made last summer and the number of free agents out of their line-up this summer, who's to say that there isn't going to be a boat load of changes to be made again? That is a very hefty question when you get down to it. The team has lots in place for next season already, including a number of superstars, but how will it all come together?

Forwards	Defense	Goaltenders
Martin St. Louis	Andrej Meszaros	Mike Smith
Vincent Lecavalier	Paul Ranger
Steven Stamkos
Ryan Malone
Vaclav Prospal
Jeff Halpern
Evgeni Artyuhkin
Adam Hall
Ryan Craig

Currently, the team you see above (12 players) comes at a cap hit of approximately $36.2 million, which is pretty healthy, considering you have three forward lines, one defense pairing and a starting goaltender already under contract. Also, the team will have roughly, depending on the cap, $20 million to spend on the remaining 11 players for a 23-man roster, which leaves plenty of money.

The Lightning will have some RFAs to deal with this summer, to help round out their line-up, including Lukas Krajicek, Mike McKenna, Karri Ramo and Matt Lashoff, also a number of others who did play a few games with the team. Krajicek should be considered the more valuable of the four, as the two goalies will likely get signed and fight for position with the team. Don't forget, the Lighning also have Riku Helenius in the system for goaltending purposes, so McKenna and Ramo cannot be too comfortable when negotiating a new deal.

There is also an interesting crop of UFAs coming out of the Lightning organization for this summer, including Cory Murphy, Matt Pettinger, Josef Melichar, Marek Malik, Noah Welch and Wade Brookbank. Murphy seems to be the most likely candidate to stay with the team, as he did enjoy plenty of success after joining the club mid-season via waivers. The others should be considered reasonable depth players for teams, but I wouldn't expect any of them to re-sign with Tampa.

The Lightning also have a couple of prospects that could make the jump into the league next season. Centre Dana Tyrell, a diminutive scoring forward with plenty of leadership traits to his name has the team buzzing, but did suffer a major knee injury this past season and his success will be hinged on how he recovers. Defenseman Ty Wishart is the other big name prospect on the team. He did figure into 5 games for the Lightning last season, registering an assist, but it's his size which has everyone buzzing.

The Lightning have plenty of firepower on their team already, which is totally obvious to any onlooker at the moment. You can go ahead and take St. Louis and Lecavalier without much fear or regret later on in the season, but then it gets awfully sketchy. The team doesn't have a lot of depth for winning games, which really takes away from their goaltending fantasy-wise. After watching Stamkos pick up his game in the back half of the season and how well he has played at the World Championships for Canada, he does have a lot more potential for more points next season. Remain skeptical of the Lightning's abilities in 2010 and try not to bank on them for a winning season.