Q. What changed about the NHL in the 13 years that you took from coaching to your 13-year term here at ESPN and then back to the NHL?

A. What changed is that it's harder to get guys to play hard every night. That's why when you get a why who's a character guy, you don't let those guys go.

Barry Melrose was fairly gracious in defeat, not offering any real cheap shots at the Lightning owners or players on the day he was fired. But the story is coming out from other sources, and according to ESPN's Scott Burnside, it seems the players of 2008 weren't enamoured with the coach lifted right out of 1994-95:

One Lightning player told ESPN.com Friday night that Melrose was incredibly easygoing and personable. But he did not come to camp with a plan that was going to help a team that had undergone a dramatic overhaul of personnel in the offseason.

It was, the player said, like shinny hockey with a few fights thrown in for good measure.

There was no system. No plan. At least not one that was discernible, he said.

Another source described how an on-ice practice session was canceled and replaced by an off-ice workout after a call from a player to ownership suggesting the move over Melrose's wishes.

The Lightning have turned into a laughingstock at this point, a team with a toxic stew in which new coach Rick Tocchet is going to have an interesting time wading through over the next 66 games.

It's all well and good to write the Melrose incident off as a goofy gambit gone wrong, but it's one that has real consequences for a franchise coming off a 30th-place finish and that is losing ground rapidly in what was once one of the NHL's few promising southern markets. Canning Melrose will cost ownership $2.25-million over the next three years, a sum to be added onto the $1.3-million already owed John Tortorella. Tocchet will also almost certainly receive a pay boost for going from an assistant to a head coach.

Coming in, co-owner Oren Koules didn't make any bones about the fact that his partnership with Len Barrie wasn't going to be the most well-moneyed ownership group in the league, and that they would look to settle in around the midpoint of the NHL's salary structure (about $47-million). At the moment, they're in the $50-million range, with huge dollars owed to Vinny Lecavalier in the future and serious cash due for coaches not to coach and staff not to work for the organization.

The Lightning had all of the hallmarks of a team that was poorly coached this season: awful special teams, dumb penalties, poor breakouts and far too many shots against. There's no question that, to salvage the season, Melrose had to go.

But there's a cost to that, just as there's been with every single other goofy move Koules and Barrie have made to this point.

And the payoff isn't coming any time soon.