In sale of Lightning, unknown beats known

TAMPA - The best thing about the next owner of the Tampa Bay Lightning might be that there is only one of him.

The other best thing is he did not have to look through all his pants in the closet for some more quarters to buy the team.

His name is Jeff Vinik, he lives in Boston and he could buy and sell Vinny Lecavalier 10 times over, though it remains to be seen if he will.

The "Cowboys," as they were dubbed by yap-happy John Tortorella, have been to their last rodeo.

"Saw" and dance man Oren Koules goes back to Hollywood, while Len Barrie will no doubt keep making a career of making investments without having any money himself, nice work if you can get it.

As for the Lightning under Vinik, we don't know, not for sure anyway. Look, I just found out it was Vinik, not Vinick. The jury is still out. Heck, the jurors haven't even sat down.

What we know is that the Unknown is better than the Known, and one Known is that Koules and Barrie were going to have trouble meeting payroll.

Vinik, an investment and hedge-fund genius, is buying the Lightning - and he's paying cash. No outside financing. Is that ever a bad thing?

Vinik the philanthropist is so rich he reportedly funded an entire wing in a Boston art museum as a birthday present for his wife. Eat your heart out, you single-red-rose types.

In other news, Vinik rarely grants interviews and is by most reports an unassuming multi-hundred millionaire, husband and father of four. He owns 2 percent of the Boston Red Sox. He is a hockey lover.

Granted, Koules and Barrie were hockey lovers, players even. That might have been the problem. They thought they were the smartest guys in the dressing room.

Give Koules credit for carrying Barrie on his wallet for as long as he did. But you can't turn a sports franchise on a dime, especially when you're running out of dimes. And there were ghastly Koules-Barrie mistakes, too - Barry Melrose's 211-minute tenure as coach, the trading

of Dan Boyle, and, so far, Brad Richards for Mike Smith.

It's Jeff Vinik's turn.

He says he has done his homework, reading books on sports and hockey management, and talked to everyone he could. But we still have no idea where he'll fit into Lightning ownership history, which, by the way, ought to come with a seal horn. The Bolts have had every kind of owner you can have.

There was mysterious Japanese owner Takashi Okubo, who no one in Tampa ever saw. We're still not sure if he was a real person. There was carnival barker Art Williams, who might have saved the franchise, but was a hockey rube. There was the best of them: Dollar Bill Davidson, who steered clear of Tampa, but won a Stanley Cup. And there were Oren and Lennie.

Look for Vinik to be above the fray, appoint professional deputies and be every bit as methodical and thorough with this team as he is with his investments, which could spell disaster for Lightning general manager Brian Lawton when Vinik connects the dots on the Andrej Meszaros deal.

Short term, I wouldn't be surprised if Vinik's team makes a deal before the March 3 trade deadline. The Bolts are on the edge of the playoff chase. Vinik might just show Lightning fans he means business.

But we won't know.

You never know much about the new owner until he actually starts owning.

But he paid cash.

And it wasn't even anyone's birthday.