What’s next for Lightning coach Jon Cooper?

With the Tampa Bay Lightning bowing out of the first round of the playoffs in five games to the Florida Panthers, this now makes it three straight years that the Lightning have been bounced in the first round. With it starting to look more and more clear that this team isn’t what it used to be, there are many questions about head coach Jon Cooper and his future with the team, whether that’s the Lightning looking to move on from him, or just Cooper looking to move on.

Frank Seravalli and Tyler Yaremchuk talked about Cooper and his future with the Lightning on Daily Faceoff Live.

Frank Seravalli: I would say that there’s smoke, and I think it’s on both ends, on the Tampa Bay Lightning end and it’s probably in Jon Cooper’s world.

This is a natural point of inflection. Your team has now lost three first round series’ in a row. You’ve had so much success over your 12-year tenure as the longest-tenured guy in the league. You’ve nearly coached a thousand regular season games with one team, which almost no one does anymore, given that the average NHL tenure is 2.3 years, which is impossibly low. You’ve done all of that.

So now the big question is, what’s next? John Cooper is not someone that’s going to sit back and smoke a cigar by his pool and just enjoy life in Tampa, which few people are better at enjoying life than John Cooper anyway. But he wants to be challenged. This is a guy who took a very different path to the NHL. He was a corporate lawyer, he was a college division one lacrosse player, he’s been all these different things, so why wouldn’t he continue to evolve and be something else?

What’s the next challenge for John Cooper? Maybe, just maybe the challenge for him is to figure out the puzzle for this Lightning team, and to get them back into contention where they’re advancing in the playoffs. But maybe Julien BriseBois is sitting there, someone who’s had a very cut-throat vision when it comes to not just trading draft picks, but also making changes in this front office, maybe it’s just time.

I’m not projecting, I’m just saying that’s where the conversation comes from, and that’s why I believe that there’s smoke there, and we could see fire, because this is a natural time to sit back and ask some of these questions.

Tyler Yaremchuk: It’s really interesting, the idea that he could move into a management role. I was talking about this with some people yesterday and it’s like, “Would he make a good GM?” Yeah, probably, but then you see the fire and the passion he had behind that bench at different moments in the series with Florida and it’s like, “How could that guy not want to be behind a bench? That’s where he belongs!” and you saw him yelling and fist bumping. So it’ll be interesting to see how it plays out.

You can watch the full episode here…