Jon Cooper on Battle of Florida, Kucherov for MVP, Torts

Inside the Tampa Bay Lightning‘s gym, there’s a team photo taken at the 2022 Stadium Series in Nashville. Every time coach Jon Cooper sees it, he marvels at how much can change in the span of two years.

“Of the 23 guys in that picture, there are only eight left. That’s a big turnover,” Cooper told ESPN’s “The Drop” podcast this week.

That roster turnover was only one challenge the Lightning faced this season. There were injuries to goalie Andrei Vasilevskiy, defenseman Mikhail Sergachev and others. There was the grind of the Eastern Conference playoff race, which saw the Lightning in unfamiliar territory as a bubble team.

But the Lightning are in a playoff seed in the final weeks of the season, heading into Saturday’s “Battle of Florida” showdown (6 p.m. ET, ESPN+/Hulu) against the Florida Panthers, their burgeoning rivals who have the best record in the NHL this season.

We asked Cooper about that rivalry, the Lightning’s resilient season, Nikita Kucherov‘s MVP case, as well as whether Cooper wants to coach the Canadian Olympic team and whether he’d ever refuse to leave the bench like John Tortorella did after an ejection this week. Note: Some answers have been edited for clarity.

The latest edition of the Battle of Florida is this weekend. You’ve coached the Lightning since 2013 …

Cooper: March, 2013. So it’s coming up soon on the anniversary date.

That was when you made the jump from Syracuse in the AHL. You had a bunch of players you coached there on the Lightning, like Nikita Kucherov, Tyler Johnson and Ondrej Palat. What were they called again?

Cooper: “The Cooper Troopers.”

This must be like reading about Maurice Richard to people who became NHL fans in the last few years.

Cooper: [Laughs] It probably does.

The point is that you were there to see this rivalry with the Panthers grow over the years. How has it changed in your tenure?

Cooper: Well, to be honest, we both probably weren’t very good in the beginning. And then we made that surprise run to the 2015 Stanley Cup Final. Florida was, at the time, struggling to make the playoffs. So there was never really kind of that budding rivalry early.

Then when [GM] Dale Tallon and [coach Joel] Quenneville came in and they restructured, and now with [GM] Bill Zito and [coach] Paul Maurice, that team started to get good as we happened to be at the peak. It’s been a battle. And I’m telling you, it’s so much fun to play against those guys. We’ve met them a couple times in the playoffs and fortunately for us we’ve come out on the right end.

I don’t know how this season’s gonna play out for anybody. They’ve had some little bit of heartache in the last few years in the playoffs and they just keep coming back and coming back. At some point, they’re gonna be knocking right at the door like they were last year.

It’s funny how that…