Dear Julien BriseClaus,

Another 130 point regular season from Nikita Kucherov has come, and another first round farewell has gone for your Tampa Bay Lightning. I’ve been a very good boy fan this year watching close to 70 regular season games and making the 13 hour round-trip drive to see them play in a building in St. Louis where they’ve won exactly five times in their 33 year franchise history. I haven’t had a drop of alcohol since the beginning of April despite being subjected to a seven game playoff series in which each contest was decided by one goal, four of them in overtime, which would be enough to drive even the most straight-edge hockey fan to the bottle. Yet I abstained.

I know losing your captain made things difficult for a multitude of reasons, the least of which is probably what you would have gotten from him on the ice, but having first-hand knowledge of the situation makes your trade deadline all that more puzzling. Emil Lilleberg had a pretty decent playoff series compared to how he played for most of his minutes during the regular season, but going into the deadline it was pretty obvious there needed to be some sort of upgrade on your LD/RD3. It was disappointing to see him paired with Declan Carlile in games one and two despite having Max Crozier healthy and waiting in the wings which would have set up a competent LH/RH 3rd pairing. When Crozier was finally activated he made an immediate, and literal, impact on the game and series which makes it even more frustrating to see that he has been mishandled for a second straight spring playoff series. It’s not going to be on my wishlist, but if Crozier isn’t in your top six full time starting this fall, I’m going to say some cuss words and continue to bang the drum that this team is better with him in the lineup instead of out of it.

I completely understand why you brought in Corey Perry at the deadline; I really do. He scored 10 goals in the playoffs last year as Edmonton once again got oh so close to winning Canada’s first Stanley Cup in 30-plus years. That’s a great move to round out the bottom-six of your roster…if you don’t have any other apparent issues. It was pretty obvious that getting scoring from outside of Nikita Kucherov, Brandon Hagel, and Jake Guentzel was going to be very hard to come by. I don’t know what the prices were in the trade market late in the year but at this point with this core anything and anyone can and should be on the table if it gives you an opportunity to get better. Getting a right-shot scoring winger or center, while understanding it would require a premium return, would have really solidified the top-six forward group going into the spring and alleviated some of the pressure on your bottom-six to produce.

Without making a move to bolster your depth scoring, you were left with a solid top-five forward group and a rotating cast of mis-fit middle or bottom-six players that included 40-year-old Corey Perry, Dominic James who had just recovered from a gruesome broken leg, Gage Goncalves, Yanni Gourde, and Nick Paul. None of those guys were going to give you what you needed scoring-wise to propel you to where you wanted to go. Giving up a 2nd round draft pick to bring in Corey Perry as your only deadline move in this context makes about as much sense as, well…let’s just say something outrageous like giving up five draft picks to acquire Tanner Jeannot.

All this to say Mr. BriseClaus, is that I have put together a list of things I would like from you in this crucial and pivotal summer. Your clock is ticking on guys like Andrei Vasilevskiy, Nikita Kucherov, and Brayden Point, and you’ve already seen a decline in Victor Hedman’s game. You are going to have $14,056,667 in cap space this summer, the most this franchise has had since? Weaponize it. You have an opportunity here to really bolster this roster and put yourself in a position to be a legitimate Cup contender not only this coming season but the next couple as well.

Without further ado, BriseClaus, this is what I want for Christmas the offseason

Re-sign Darren Raddysh

For a guy who had 73 total points in 176 games over his first four seasons in the NHL, he sure did pick one hell of a time to score 70 in 73 games in 2025-26. Raise your hand if you saw that coming. No one? Yeah me neither. He was a revelation in the Lightning lineup this season and it’s obvious that the torch has been passed from Victor Hedman on to JJ Moser and Darren Raddysh as the franchise’s top defensemen who, when paired together for 882 regular season minutes, were the eighth-best pairing in the league at 60.5% goal share on 50.2% xGF and 34.2% xGA. With the previously mentioned weak UFA class this summer, especially defensemen, Raddysh will be one of the top free agents come July 1. He will undoubtedly field offers from most of the teams in the league with enough cap space to fit him in, and it will not surprise me one bit if he ends up getting a $10-plus million AAV on a long-term deal somewhere other than Tampa. But if you can somehow get him to agree on a deal in the neighborhood of $7-$8 million AAV for five or six years, you don’t even think about letting him walk out that door without putting pen to paper. You have to be a little bit skeptical about paying any more than that to a 30-year-old who almost matched his four-year point total in a contract season, but if you can get it done at that number, you have to do it and it will go a long way toward solidifying your six man defensive unit, which had a pretty good season statistically.

Sign Alex Tuch

Look, this is going to be a longshot here but you can’t get to July 1st without at least trying to get Alex Tuch in the fold. There are reports out there that he is looking for $10-11 million AAV which might be a little bit tough to get to, especially if Darren Raddysh ends up signing a little higher AAV than I’m expecting, but you have options here and one of them would be trading Brayden Point and his $9.5 million cap hit for the next four seasons. If you think you’re going to get a better version of Point going forward, you can choose to move Nick Paul and his $3.15 AAV out instead, it would just leave you with quite a bit less wiggle room. Dominic James proved that he can play center in the NHL and do so at a very high level and by all accounts I would be very surprised if Sam O’Reilly isn’t given a serious look out of camp to make the roster this fall. The center depth isn’t as bleak as it might appear and given the decline in Brayden Point’s production you can and probably will get the same or better out of James and/or O’Reilly for a fraction of the cap hit. Basically what I’m trying to say is that while you would lose a centerman in Point for a winger in Tuch, that doesn’t create as dire of a situation down the middle as it would first seem. You desperately need top and middle-six scoring and Tuch scored 33 goals and assisted on 33 more. Not only can he fill the net, but he’s one of the better two-way defensive wingers in the league as well, posting a 51% CF and a 61.6% goal share in 1,082 regular season minutes. He’s also a top-notch penalty killer logging the 3rd most minutes on the Buffalo Sabres PK unit and contributing 15 shorthanded points over the last two seasons. I’ve had visions of rolling out Hagel-Cirelli-Tuch and watching them torture the other team’s top line into submission. Make it happen.

Find someone who can play with Kucherov and Guentzel

Note: This is obviously contingent on moving Brayden Point This could either be the easiest or the most difficult item on my list to accomplish, and I’m not really 100 percent sure which way that will fall. It’s a small sample size, but in just over 15 minutes 5v5 TOI, Jake Guentzel-Dominic James-Nikita Kucherov had a 62.8% CF, 100% goal share (2-0), and 78% xGF. Before the James injury, Jon Cooper found something in a line of Guentzel-James-Goncalves which had 50% CF, and a 60% goal share on 54.4% xGF in just over 70 minutes TOI at 5v5, so we have a little bit more than just those 15 minutes of James driving play to go off of. Dominic James was an absolute spark plug in the first-round series against Montreal, it seemed like he was everywhere on the forecheck, he scored two goals in pivotal moments of the series despite the Lightning losing in both games, and set up Gage Goncalves’ game six overtime winner to send the series back to Tampa for a game seven. He just has “IT” and after a full offseason in the Tampa Bay system, I would expect to see James take his game to another level and could be the perfect solution for the 1C between your two-best offensive forwards if you’re looking to fill that position internally. I had mentioned Dominic James not being ready for the big stage of the playoffs when talking about the deadline earlier, but his game in the Montreal series proved me wrong and I think he could be ready to fill that role this fall. With the bad UFA class this summer I don’t necessarily think you’ll be able to find a top-six center in free agency, but it sounds like things were progressing down the road between the Lightning and the Rangers on a Vincent Trocheck trade at the deadline, maybe the two pick those talks up around the draft?

Need a solution for the Jonas problem

I’m not going to spend too much time on this, but you need to move on from the Jonas Johansson Experience™. He is 20-16 in 44 games over two seasons with the Lightning. Simply put, that’s just not good enough considering what you get out of Andrei Vasilevksiy night in and night out. Johansson had an .884 save percentage this season to go along with his 3.29 goals against average, good (bad?) for 49th and 55th in the league, respectfully. He had an xGA of 67.5 but gave up 78 in 25 games played for a whopping -10.4 GSAE, coming in at 59th in the league. I would imagine as Vasilevskiy gets older, they will try and meter his burn throughout the regular season, making the backup goaltender position all that much more important. You got a few good seasons out of grizzled vets in Curtis McElhinney and Brian Elliott, if you can bring in someone with a similar pedigree you have to do it. Jonas starts have become penciled-in losses and you are actually pleasantly surprised when you win a game with him in net. That’s not good enough for a team with Stanley Cup aspirations. Bury him in Syracuse if you have to, but you need to find someone else to spell the Big Cat for 30 games this fall.

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In conclusion Julien BriseClaus, I don’t think I’ve asked for too much. I actually don’t think you need to do a whole lot to make this team a serious contender again. You have the pieces in place to build around and with just a couple tweaks, I have no doubt that you’ll be able to find that same magic you had during the one and a half month-long span which saw your club take points in 21 out of 22 games leading up to the Olympic break.

I’ll be sure to leave you Molson and maple taffy for when you stop by, please don’t let me down.

Sincerely,

Jared