MVN: Most Valuable Network

The Tampa Bay Lightning fired head coach Barry Melrose over the weekend after the team got off to a 5-7-4 start. Ideally, the gist of the move is to stop the bleeding before the season gets too far along and there's no time to turn it around, but I'm here to tell you that it was a meaningless move. THis team is dead in the water less than a quarter of the way into the season.

This was a very strange offseason for Tampa Bay. For a long time, their team was Vinny Lecavalier, Martin St. Louis, Brad Richards, and 18-20 completely expendable and replaceable scrubs. Add in a complete lack of a dependable goaltender, and you have a team that struggled out of the gate last season as well, going 5-8-1 through their first 14 games. They went on to not see .500 after December 11th in a mess of a season.

The team dealt away Brad Richards and got themselves a dependable goalie in Mike Smith, a good young winger in Jussi Jokinen, and a solid veteran center in Jeff Halpern, but they still struggled to win consistently because nobody outside of St. Louis and Lecavalier was producing on offense. Come the end of the season, those two accounted for almost 40% of their team's offensive production.

So, how did the front office fix this problem? They fired head coach John Tortorella and replaced him with Barry Melrose, a guy who hadn't coached in any capacity at any level since 1995. Then, they went free agent shopping. Who did they bring in? March Recchi, Gary Roberts, Ryan Malone, Adam Hall, Matt Pettinger, Marek Malik, Olaf Kolzig and #1 draft pick Steve Stamkos.

Let's look at those players: Recchi, Roberts, Malone and Hall all played with Pittsburgh last season and were all not retained because they were (accurately) deemed unspectacular and replaceable. Also, Recchi is 40 and Roberts is 42.

The rest are all the same. Malik is 33, Kolzig is 38, both free agents because their previous teams considered them not young or talented enough to be worth replacing.

The question then becomes, if they weren't worth keeping for their previous teams, why would they be worth signing to your team?

Granted, the team possesses more offensive talent now, between Lecavalier, St. Louis, Jokinen, and Stamkos. However, Stamkos is as far in over his head as he looks, because as talented as he is, he is far too green to the NHL game to have so little talent around him.

This reminds me of being a Pittsburgh Pirates fan over the years of the now-dead Dave Littlefield Era. The Lightning management brought in a lot of recognizable names who played for good teams, who who themselves are not good players.

I appreciate that because bringing in Melrose as coach wasn't really a solution to anything, firing him doesn't really solve anything. He had a team that didn't respect him and wasn't responding, and there's no point retaining a lame duck coach. We'll see if they play for the new guy.

Between the random muckpile of free agents the team brought in to surround their two stars, two supporting players and star-to-be, and the strange choice of Barry Melrose as coach, it's hard to believe that the new ownership in Tampa really has the slightest clue what they are doing.

Now things get even stranger for the team, since the firing of Melrose means the promotion of Rick Tocchet to interim head coach. That's right, the same Rick Tocchet who had spent the last two seasons completely out of hockey because he got caught gambling. A fine, upstanding choice as a fill-in coach, for sure.

I can only think that the question Tampa fans have left is whether the new ownership is still figuring out what it takes and things will get better, or whether the fans are doomed because those guys haven't got the foggiest clue.

Without some serious changes in tactics, I'll have to lean towards the latter.