Esposito, Gainey celebrate legacies with Stars, Lightning in Cup Final

Bob Gainey and Phil Esposito might be 1,500 miles apart during the Stanley Cup Final, but they're joined at the hip, the first general managers of the Dallas Stars and Tampa Bay Lightning.

The 2020 championship series being played at Rogers Place in Edmonton is the first Stanley Cup Final between two Sun Belt teams, each aiming for its second title.
Watching on TV from his hometown of Peterborough, Ontario, Gainey is pulling for the Stars, having arrived in Dallas in 1993 as GM of a relocated team that had been founded as the Minnesota North Stars as part of the NHL's 1967 six-team expansion.

Bob Gainey behind the Dallas Stars bench.
It was Gainey who from the mid-to-late 1990s built Dallas into a Stanley Cup contender, then hit the pot of gold with the 1999 team going all the way.
"I'm happy to see the Stars where they are now," said Gainey, who won five championships while playing his entire 1,160-game NHL career with the Montreal Canadiens. "I know that their fans in the Dallas area and those who follow them from afar are happy to see them there and they deserve to be there. They're a really good team.
"I have the lucky situation where I could have a team in each conference and that would give me two horses in the race. I wouldn't be in a danger zone unless the Canadiens and Stars ended up in the Final against each other."
From a makeshift broadcast studio in Tampa Bay's Amalie Arena, where he's doing radio color commentary, Esposito loudly proclaims himself to be a fierce fan of the Lightning, having been a driving force in bringing the expansion team to Florida in 1992.
In Tampa Bay's fledgling days, Esposito was team president, general manager and chief marketer, selling sponsorships, tickets and pretty much everything except arena beer.
The native of Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, played 1,282 games between 1963-81 for the Chicago Blackhawks, Boston Bruins and New York Rangers, winning the Stanley Cup in 1970 and 1972 with the Bruins. He was a Lightning radio broadcaster when the team won its Cup in 2004.

Bob Gainey (left) and Phil Esposito early in their NHL careers.
As they now pull for their respective sides, Gainey, 66, and Esposito, 78, take great pride in the roles they played in building the Stars and Lightning, cherishing memories of importing the NHL into non-traditional hockey markets.
Gainey was coach and GM of the North Stars when the team moved south to begin the 1993-94 season, having coached and managed the team in Minnesota after cutting his coaching teeth in France in 1989-90, diving in immediately upon his NHL retirement as a player.
If Texas had a rich minor pro hockey history dating to the 1940s, the NHL would be a different product, one that hoped to share a crowded stage dominated by the NFL's Dallas Cowboys, baseball's Texas Rangers and the NBA's Dallas Mavericks.
"It was an unknown for me and for many of us who were involved," Gainey said of the move. "We learned quickly more than 25 years ago that Dallas is a very avid sports-minded community. And people came to our games. The business community gave us a chance. They said, 'This is a new entity, why not? This could be good.' It took a lot of work by the parts of the organization that were trying to establish ticket and sponsorship sales. But eventually we got there, and we had a very, very good relationship with the community."
Esposito, who was GM of the Rangers from 1986-89, had been feeling out the expansion process in the early 1990s when then-NHL President John Ziegler told him to stay away from Texas. Esposito had his eye on Florida anyway, and believed that the North Stars might be headed to Houston, his goaltending brother Tony's final minor-pro stop on his way to the NHL.

Tampa Bay Lightning GM Phil Esposito with defenseman Roman Hamrlik, the No. 1 pick in the 1992 NHL Draft.
He recalls playing golf in Orlando when he took a call inviting him to Tampa to meet with high-profile lawyer Henry Paul, who ultimately would be a Lightning co-founder.
"As I'm driving into the city, there are no buildings. No buildings!" Esposito said. "I'm saying to myself, 'Where are the buildings? How can this be the 12th largest television market in the country?' I didn't know anything about St. Pete, Clearwater, Bradenton or Brandon, where we'd have fans. I didn't know anything about Tampa then. All I knew was that they had the NFL Tampa Bay Buccaneers and they weren't very good. I thought we could steal a lot of their business.
"I went to Miami, Orlando and Jacksonville before deciding to come to Tampa. The decision was clear as a bell to me. I asked Henry Paul in our very first meeting, 'Do you think hockey can survive in this area?' Henry said, 'Well, Phil, we love football, (NASCAR) car crashes, boxing and wrestling. Seems to me you've got all of that in hockey.' I said, 'I'm going for it, are you with me?' and he said, 'Yes, I am.' That's how it started -- myself, Henry and our partner Mel Lowell."
Gainey looks back fondly at the Stars 1999 Stanley Cup championship team, one that he helped assemble.

From left, Bob Gainey, Marcel Dionne and Lanny McDonald with the Hall of Fame rings as members of the Class of 1992.
"We were able to pick up a player like Joe Nieuwendyk, for instance," he said, the future Hall of Fame center acquired by trade from the Calgary Flames in 1995 for forwards Jarome Iginla and Corey Millen. "Free-agency arrived, and we found Pat Verbeek (in 1996) and Ed Belfour (1997). We learned how to win over two or three years of playoffs where we were eliminated -- by Edmonton early (seven-game 1997 Western Conference Quarter-Finals), then a disappointing loss deeper in the playoffs to Detroit (six-game 1998 conference final). But those are the things that ultimately take you up to the next level of competition and allow you to really compete for the Cup.
"In 1999, we won our first game of the year, started the season in first place and didn't leave it to win the Stanley Cup," Gainey said. "It was an end-to-end commitment by the team and players to accomplish what had just been out of our reach the previous couple of years."
It was the Stars' championship parade, modest by most standards, that Gainey says was one of his most enjoyable and rewarding moments in Dallas.
"I realized that we had a cross-section of the whole city that was really enjoying the team's success," he said. "For me, that was the message that we weren't just a flash like a sports team that enters a market and stays for a little while then leaves. We'd penetrated deeper and broader and the franchise, handled properly, could be there for a long time."

Brothers Phil and Tony Esposito play a 1970s table hockey game bearing their names.
More than 1,000 miles to the east, Esposito remembers delegating many of the Lightning roster decisions to his brother, Tony, whom he brought in as director of player personnel.
"I was busy selling tickets," he said. "Tony would come to me and ask for my opinion and I'd just say, 'Brother, do what you think is right, that's fine with me.'
"I remember the first couple years, people up in Canada and the Boston and New York area saying that I was a raving (expletive) lunatic for trying to put hockey in Florida. I just didn't understand it. I think it was the ego of the Canadian media that couldn't deal with it. The fact is, you play indoors. You keep the building at 69 or 70 degrees and the ice is fine."
It's with fatherly pride that Esposito supports the Lightning, and he gets a kick out of fans asking him whether he cheers for the Bruins, with whom he enjoyed his greatest playing success as a fearsome, record-setting sniper, or Tampa Bay.
"I tell them, 'Are you kidding me? I gave birth to the Lightning. There's no question. None,' " he said. "If the Lightning were out of the playoffs and Boston was still in, yeah, I'd probably cheer for Boston a little bit.
"Of course, I'm pulling for the Lightning. I'd love to see them win the Cup for (owner) Jeff Vinik and for the fans. It'll make it even better around here. What's going on downtown is amazing. And you know what? There are buildings in Tampa now. Lots of them."