The team behind the team: A quick turnaround

It's 1:28 a.m., and I'm sitting on the back bench seat of a box truck outside the Barclays Center in Brooklyn waiting for a security guard to wake another security guard to open the tractor trailer-sized elevator that delivers large vehicles to the arena's event level.

Kevin, an equipment manager for the New York Islanders who handles visiting teams, is driving. He called 10 minutes earlier, as the truck was entering the Dumbo section of Brooklyn from the Manhattan Bridge, to alert arena security the Tampa Bay Lightning equipment truck was about to arrive.
When we pull up to the elevator, however, it's a ghost town, at least, as much as the streets of New York City can be at 1 in the morning.
We wait a little until Kevin gets out to see what's up at the security door. Moments later, someone comes out and walks over to the guard shack on the other side of the truck. Another guy comes of the shack, obviously wiping the sleep out of his eyes, and hits a button on the arena wall.
Inside the truck, we laugh. And are a little jealous. Most of the guys in the truck were up by 7 a.m. and at Buffalo's KeyBank Center since 8 in the morning, where they spent the day getting the Lightning ready for their game that night against the Sabres, before packing all of the gear again, shoving it into a plane, flying to Newark, unloading into the box truck and driving the 40 minutes through the Holland Tunnel across Manhattan and over the East River it takes to reach the arena.
The doors of the elevator open, and inside we go, shutting the engine off as the door closes behind (pesky carbon monoxide poisoning and all).
Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the elevator lowers, the only sign of movement are the marks on the wall in front creeping upward. After a minute, the front door opens and the bowels of Barclays are exposed. Tractor trailers for the television networks are parked 40 yards ahead to our right. There's a security area to the left, a semi-circular wall of tinted windows with "Brooklyn" spray painted street-art style on the block below. Behind that security area and across a hallway, the ice rink where the Tampa Bay Lightning will play the New York Islanders lies dormant.
On the floor directly in front of us is a "turntable" roughly 100 feet in diameter with a couple cars lined up on its perimeter. The turntable allows trucks to enter the event level and spin around without having to maneuver the 100-point turn it would take to flip directions inside the cramped quarters. We drive onto the turntable but turn around the old-fashioned way, partly because our truck is smaller than a tractor trailer but probably because the turntable operator is dozing away somewhere behind the blackened windows.
"Has the turntable ever broken during an event," someone asks Kevin.
"No, but we've had both elevators go out at that same time. That was an interesting night."
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The unload goes much the same way as it did in Buffalo. Berger knows what's inside each bag even though they all look alike. He shouts to Kevin inside the truck:
"That's a TV trunk."
"That's dirty."
"That's staying."
"Keep it."
"Lalonde? Yep, I need that."
By the time all the equipment is separated and heading to its appropriate place inside its new temporary home, Bubba and Razor have nearly completed setting up the locker room. The two have known each other since their college days when Razor was working in a pro shop and Bubba was an equipment guy for his college hockey team at University of Illinois at Chicago and buying equipment from Razor's pro shop. Later, after Razor had gotten a job with the IHL's Chicago Wolves, Bubba's college program got dropped, and Razor asked Bubba if he wanted to work. They were together in Chicago a season. Razor moved on to the Detroit Vipers and eventually the Lightning when the Viper's owner, Bill Davidson, bought the newly-formed Lightning. Bubba went from Muskegon to Cleveland to his NHL breakthrough with the Florida Panthers for two seasons before he heard back from Razor about a job opening in Tampa Bay.
Razor's in his 20th season with the Lightning organization. Bubba's on year 12.
"You've got to be in the right place at the right time and get to know people to get the jobs," Bubba says. "But then you've got to be good at your job to keep it. So, yeah, I've been lucky in that sense. Things have always worked out."
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I ask Bubba about the Buffalo game, now a couple hours old, if it was tough for him not to be on the bench and watch from a TV in one of the back rooms. He says it makes him feel disconnected. And he wonders if it affects the players' psyche too, creatures of routine and all. He tells me how during the team's incredible point streak in December when the Lightning went 15-0-1, 16-straight games with at least one point, two games shy of matching the franchise record, there were only two places he and Razor couldn't be on the bench during warmups.
Winnipeg and San Jose
The Lightning lost in overtime in Winnipeg, the only blemish during the point streak.
The point streak ended in San Jose.
"There's about six different routines that happen pregame," Bubba says. "Heddy has his thing. Pally has a thing. Cally has a thing with Mully. Johnny has a thing…I'm not saying that's why we lost, but I find that interesting."
I do too.
Bubba puts the last pair of gloves in a locker. Berger and Brandon slide nameplates into holders on each stall. The room is ready. The work is done.
Kevin turns on a heater in the room on our way out. The guys talk about meeting up around 8 in the morning to get break fast before hurrying over to the rink. As we hop back into the truck, ride up the elevator and drive down the street six blocks to our team hotel where Kevin drops us off for the night, Razor looks at the clock on his phone.
It's 2:10 a.m.
It was 1:28 when we arrived at Barclays. The unload took less than an hour.
"That was fast actually," he says. "Really fast."