On the Tampa Bay Ligntning and Ben Bishop …
Joe Smith of the Tampa Bay Times: Lightning goaltender Ben Bishop admits he’s not sure where he’ll be playing after the trade deadline. Bishop is hoping to remain with the Lightning for the rest of the season.
“Obviously we have a great team, a great organization and great place to play,” Bishop said Thursday. “Obviously the grass isn’t always greener on the other side. You want to win where you are. You don’t really think about next year, or anything but next game.
“But we’ll see where it takes us. That’s my feeling. But at the same time, I want to play, too.”
Bishop has a no-movement clause. At the moment, there doesn’t appear to be a big market for goaltenders.
GM Steve Yzerman won’t just give Bishop away.
“If I could do something that helped our team make a trade that identified a need for us — not just for this year, but going forward — I would do that and haven’t been able to do that to this point,” Yzerman said Thursday on the team’s website show. “And that’s been going on, really, since the draft last year.”
Bryan Burns of TampaBayLightning.com: GM Yzerman said that the trade talk is quiet at the moment, but he expects talks to pick up.
“It’s relatively quiet around the league for a lot of reasons,” Yzerman said. “One is simply the cap. A lot of teams don’t have the cap space. And another is, everybody is kind of in the fight. There’s very few teams that would consider today and say, ‘We’re out of it…We’re just going to start moving our assets.’ And those teams need partners, and the teams at the top don’t have the cap space and don’t have the urgency to do anything, so it’ll get closer to the deadline for us, or in the middle a little bit. And we’re trying to win.