TAMPA, Fla. — It was one thing to feel the all-too-familiar sting of another first-round playoff exit. What made it even more difficult for the Tampa Bay Lightning heading into an early summer was that they felt like they had recaptured the camaraderie and swagger of the franchise’s championship teams.

The organization has been remarkably consistent. The Lightning field a star-laden squad full of future Hall of Famers. They are one of the top scoring teams, equally as stout defensively.

At the beginning of last season, they were missing a key ingredient. They needed to get tougher. They needed to truly feel like a team, one full of players who would battle for each other.

And, man, did they.

The Water Street Bullies were born.

The Lightning went from a team pushed around by the Florida Panthers in back-to-back first-round postseason meetings to one that showed no mercy in trying to knock any opponent’s block off. They let the emotion of the game fuel them. They jumped into the fray for each other, and by the end of the season, they earned the reputation of the aggressors.

Going into a new season, count on the Lightning leaning into their new identity. They believe this renewed level of toughness is an important piece of recapturing their past glory.

“I think last year was a good year of instilling that,” left wing Brandon Hagel said. “And I think that’s just who we are now. That’s how we believe we become closer as a team, and now we believe that when we go into the playoffs, I can look next to the guy that I maybe didn’t know or didn’t know him as well in Game 1, but in the playoffs, I can look to my right and know his head’s going to go through a wall.”

A fight card unlike any other

The Lightning led the league in fights with 44 in the 2025-26 regular season, more than twice as many as they recorded the previous season (20) and 11 more than the next-highest team (Boston, 33).

The Lightning also had double the misconduct penalties (20) and game misconduct penalties (6) than any other team in the league. Last season’s 1,207 penalty minutes were the most by any team in 17 years, 91 minutes more than when the Panthers won the Stanley Cup in 2023-24.

“We’ve always been a team that plays hard,” Lightning coach Jon Cooper said. “We play tough, and guys care for each other, and they understand they won’t be taken advantage of. Unfortunately, people can look at it and say, ‘Well, you didn’t win your playoff round or whatever.’ But we won a lot of rounds with the same mentality and the same belief.”

“Ultimately, the goal of the game is to score more goals than the other team,” Cooper added. “That’s where it’s at. But our belief is there’s a lot more to it than just that, and when your players can sit a couple inches taller on the bench and their chests stick out a little farther than normal, I just think you feel more comfortable on the ice, and you play better.”

What’s most interesting about the number of scuffles is it wasn’t just one or two players in dust-ups. Nineteen different players received fighting majors in the regular season.

“It’s great to see that kind of backbone throughout the whole lineup,” said Lightning enforcer Scott Sabourin, who had five fights last season. “One guy isn’t enough to make a team tough. You need 18-20 guys. The whole team’s got to be tough together and stand in there together.

“And the more you don’t back down, the other teams realize that and they might shy away a little more and the next thing you know, you’re winning more battles and and the next thing you know there’s more pucks in the net and you’re winning more games.”

A page out of the Panthers’ playbook

There’s no doubt that the rival Panthers played a big part in creating the Lightning’s hardened DNA.

Florida won back-to-back Cups by literally running through teams, elbows high, with no apologies. Two postseasons ago, Hagel — the Lightning’s emotional leader — was knocked out of the postseason by an illegal elbow to the head from Aaron Ekblad. Last preseason, Panthers forward A.J. Greer sucker-punched Hagel in a game that ended with eight fighting majors. The next preseason game against the Panthers included 14 ejections.

“That’s where it started,” Lightning defenseman J.J. Moser said. “But you always can say, ‘Yeah, everyone can do it a little bit.’ But I think it just showed the longer we kept it up, and the longer we continuously did it, is when you feel like ‘OK, now it’s becoming part of our identity.’

“Now it’s not like a thing you have to think about or focus on in order for it to be done, but it’s just who you are and who you become.”

By the midway point of last season, players who rarely got into confrontations were the first to act.

Lightning forward Jake Guentzel quickly dropped gloves after taking an elbow to the head from Florida’s Niko Mikkola in a Dec. 15 game. That was the first fight of his decade-long NHL career. Even goaltender Andrei Vasilevskiy logged his first NHL fight in the Stadium Series in February. It was a game-changing moment in the Lightning’s comeback win over the Boston Bruins at Raymond James Stadium.

“I think just the importance of going into a game having sent the message to teams with the way past games have gone or other games that we played against different opponents, they know that it’s not going to be easy,” Lightning defenseman Ryan McDonagh said. “That’s all you want to identify as. That’s the message you want, that certainly it’s not going to be easy to score goals against us. It’s not going to be easy to keep us off the score sheet.

“It’s not going to be easy to push us around. That’s something that this group is proud to say that is a part of us.”

By the end of the regular season, the Lightning were drawing division opponents like Buffalo and Montreal into physical games, instilling bad blood and creating new rivalries. Hagel joked that the Lightning’s games were like WWE on ice, and they were loving every minute of it.

“That was also, like, something even against the more skilled teams or the teams that we don’t have that kind of rivalry yet, you’re like, ‘OK, that’s what we’re all about and that’s how it’s going to go every night,’” Moser said.

Building on a new identity

Despite the transformation, the Lightning fell in the first round again. The series against the Montreal Canadiens went seven games with every matchup decided by one goal. The Lightning tried to pull the Canadiens into a more physical game. Hagel literally brought the Lightning into the fight by dropping Montreal forward Juraj Slafkovsky in Tampa Bay’s Game 2 win to even the series. But their bullying really didn’t faze the level-headed Canadiens.

“In the regular season, it’s a little bit different than in the playoffs,” Lightning center Anthony Cirelli said. “The mistakes intensify. Penalties are obviously a big, big part of the playoffs. You don’t want to be taking penalties. Things tighten up, less goals and stuff. So I think it’s maybe controlling our emotions a little bit more once playoff time comes.”

It’s clear that they plan to build on the identity established last season.

“It’s non-negotiable,” Guentzel said. “You have to have it. All the teams that win, it’s what are you gonna do for your teammates and the teams that are winning, that’s all you care about.”

Said Moser: “It’s crucial that we carry this on. It’s one of the basic ingredients that you need to win, and we did it last year, and we got to do it this year again.”

Their identity shift didn’t lead to better postseason results but Cooper said sometimes it takes time to get rewarded, alluding to the Lightning’s Presidents’ Trophy team that was swept in the first round before Tampa Bay went on to win back-to-back Cups.

“Sometimes you win 62 games and get swept,” Cooper said. “And maybe you don’t know at the time, but maybe that helps you years down the road. It just hasn’t helped us quite yet. We gave the fans playoff hockey, just not enough of it.

“But I think when you have success at something, there’s a bit of a recipe there, but you need players that believe in that, and the guys in that room do.”

____

©2026 Tampa Bay Times. Visit tampabay.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.