Deal Is in Place to Sell the Lightning

A 17-month search to find a buyer for the struggling Tampa Bay Lightning is over.

The NHL club and its lease to the Ice Palace arena were sold Monday to Palm Beach businessman Arthur L. Williams, a one-time Canadian Football League owner who made his fortune in insurance.

While terms of the sale were not disclosed, Williams’ offer is believed to be comparable to the $130 million that Detroit Pistons owner William Davidson reportedly had offered.

The Lightning faced a Monday deadline to respond to Davidson, who appeared to be the front-runner to obtain the team, which finished with a NHL-worst 17-55-10 record last season.

“Art Williams offered the most financially sound proposal of any of the groups who pursued the team,” Lightning President and CEO Chuck Hasegawa said in a statement. “Our desire in selling the team was to insure our fans and the community that we had seriously committed ownership. Mr. Williams will provide that support.”

Hasegawa said the sale is expected to be closed by June 30, pending NHL approval.

Williams, 56, was unable to attend a news conference because he is out of the country, team officials said.

“Tampa Bay is a wonderful community and I so look forward to next season. . . . I can’t wait to close and get started,” Williams said in a statement.

A native of Waycross, Ga., Williams founded A.L. Williams & Associates in Atlanta in 1977, and within 12 years the company grew into the nation’s largest seller of individual life insurance. The Palm Beach resident sold the company to New York-based Primerica Corporation in 1989.

The six-year-old Lightning had been owned since their inception by Takashi Okubo, a Japanese businessman who never attended a game and didn’t meet NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman until last month.

Attendance dipped 20% last season and staggering debts also made it difficult to sell the team.

*

New York Islander Coach Mike Milbury signed a five-year contract to remain as the team’s coach.

Milbury, also the team’s general manager, will remain in charge of all player personnel decisions. All other duties, including negotiating contracts, will be reassigned under a new management group.

“What this does is divest me of some of my responsibilities to allow me to concentrate on my duties as coach,” Milbury said. “For instance, actual contract negotiations will now no longer be my responsibility.”

Milbury’s coaching role will also undergo changes. He will have four assistants, including an offensive and defensive coordinator.

*

Ron Wilson began to get downright sentimental when he started thinking about the upcoming Eastern Conference finals series between his Washington Capitals and the Buffalo Sabres.

“My dad played 13 years in the minor leagues for Buffalo,” said Wilson, who lived two miles across the Niagara River in Fort Erie, Ontario. “And sometimes you look and you say [this series] is sort of a fate kind of thing.

“I learned to play hockey in Buffalo. A lot of the same people are there. The trainers are there that I swept the dressing room up with [at the old Memorial Auditorium]. This is really going to be a lot of fun.”

Larry Wilson went to win a Stanley Cup with Detroit, and brother John Wilson, Ron’s uncle, got his name on the Cup four times with the Red Wings in the 1940s and 1950s. That bloodline of success has kept Ron Wilson’s goal higher than that of many Capitals fans, who in Wilson’s first season were simply hoping to see their team get past the first round of the playoffs.

“When you see people in your family with their name on the Stanley Cup, you understand its eternity,” Wilson said. “It’d be better than anything you’d put on a tombstone, I think. Maybe you just put, ‘Check the Stanley Cup, his name’s there.’ That’s what I’d want to be able to put.”