Page 47 - Sports Illustrated Kids (April 2019)

FROM THE PAGES OF

BY
ALEX PREWITT

PHOTOGR APHS BY
DAVID E. KLUTHO

IT IS HALF past midnight when Jon
Cooper emerges from his office at
Amalie Arena, necktie loosened under a
dark-blue suit. He spies a nearby clock.
Idling in the doorway, Cooper, Tampa’s
51-year-old coach, surveys the standard
postgame coaching flotsam: crumpled
stat sheets, closed laptops, darkened TV screens, a sushi
party platter whittled down to some tuna sashimi and a
golf-ball-sized glob of wasabi. By now, though—nearly three
hours after the Lightning finished a 6–3 win over visiting
San Jose on Jan. 19, maintaining their huge lead over the
rest of the Eastern Conference entering the NHL All-Star
break—the rest of his staff have gone home.
“I know we’re blessed, making a lot of money and all,”
Cooper says, out of nowhere. “But if you broke it down
by hour. . . .”
He grabs a seat in the bullpen, the nickname for the
windowless workspace that Tampa Bay’s coaching staff shares
for studying film, discussing tactics and mercilessly roasting

one another. For the past three days Sports Illustrated
has hunkered down here with Cooper and his assistants, at-

tending prescout meetings and strategy sessions, seeing how
the league’s best team—and, at six seasons, its longest-tenured
head coach—endeavors to bring order to a chaotic game.
More than their peers in other sports, NHL coaches are
rendered largely helpless when the action starts. Sure, they
bark line changes and scribble face-off plays on whiteboards,
but they aren’t MLB managers ordering defensive shifts or SPORTS ILLUSTRATED
NFL offensive coordinators radioing calls from the booth,
able to watch their calculations pay off with •
real-time results. So what is a coach, that FEBRUARY 11, 2019
A RIES supposed to do? 49
singular breed of master micromanager,

“I don’t think people appreciate all the
work that goes into this job,” he says. “Be-
cause it’s a lot more than drawing the X’s
and O’s of a neutral zone forecheck.”

— and devote themselves totally to giving the NHL’s best team its edge. SI went behind the scenes

FF and found that the roots of their success go far deeper than plotting the perfect penalty kill