The Tampa Bay Lightning’s seven-game win streak was the second longest in the NHL this season. The Lightning should savor this accomplishment. But after a few seconds of pride, they need to turn inward and look at what went wrong against the Las Vegas Golden Knights last night. In many ways it is a miracle that they only lost in the final seconds.
The penalty kill did not go well. All four goals by Las Vegas came with the man advantage. And there were some patterns: allowing the seam pass through the middle of the ice, losing battles in the corners, lost faceoffs, and doing a poor job protecting the area around the blue paint.
Special teams dictated almost all of the scoring. The Bolts’ power play unit was able to alleviate some of the pain from the penalty kill, scoring two goals of their own. Steven Stamkos scored on a one-timer in the first period, and Vladislav Namestikov displayed some nifty stick work along the goal line.
But special teams play is mercurial. The Lightning power play, which is currently first in the league, will cool off. And the Tampa Bay penalty kill, 22nd in the NHL, will improve. What was really concerning in the Lightning play against the Golden Knights was that Las Vegas was the better even-strength team by a noticeable margin. They generated 8 High Danger Chances to the Lightning’s 3. The Golden Knights’ team Corsi and Fenwick were both better. Tampa Bay struggled on zone exits and surrendered the puck in their own zone and the middle of the ice. The Erik Haula goal was emblematic of the Lightning’s woes.
Early in the third period, with the score tied at 2, the Lightning reset in their own zone. Las Vegas clustered behind their side of the red line, waiting to pounce when Tampa Bay tried their entry. Stamkos ran a curl in his own zone and, once he reached the red line, was met by a cabal of Vegas skaters. His attempt to dump the puck past the wall was denied.
The puck spit back to to Stamkos, who tapped it back to Anton Stralman. Stralman whipped it across to Mikhail Sergachev, who tried to create a play while the Lightning forwards crept toward the far blue line. With Vegas’s James Neal in pursuit and his teammate, Haula well-positioned along the red line to force a turnover, Sergachev coughed the puck up. Haula dived to poke the puck into the corner of the offensive zone, and things sped up in a deleterious way. Neal glided past a flailing Sergachev. Namestikov left Haula alone in the low slot and tried to stop Neal, and with two men pursuing Neal, Neal found a wide-open Haula for the low-slot pass. While Sergachev was turning the puck over, he high-sticked Neal, and seconds later on the power play the Golden Knights took a 3-2 lead off a Haula deflection.
The sequence is worth dissecting because it featured many of the symptoms that were harming the Lightning all game long. The Lightning struggled on their entries and could not rely on their defensemen for playmaking.
The Golden Knights deserve a lot of credit for their performance. Tampa Bay’s transition offense was defanged. The Lightning cycle struggled to find opportunities inside the dots. Conversely, while Tampa Bay struggled to find traction on rush opportunities, the Golden Knights were able to generate offense on their entries. The Golden Knights had success not just in their north-south passing, but also east-west. Their defensemen were able to create scoring chances. In the offensive zone, they retrieved the puck and exploited open space. It was almost like they out-Lightning-ed the Lightning.
Interestingly, one of the best rush chances for the Lightning came after a failed breakout when their forwards sunk deep into their own zone to help assist on the zone exit. This led to Stamkos almost scoring off a one-on-one-turned-breakaway as he beat a Vegas defender toward the net. Moreover, even when the Lightning forwards did depart the zone early, this did not create consistent rush opportunities or an effective forecheck.
This is just one game, so it is hardly a crisis or a call for a departure from strategy. However, the spatial separation that exists between a vulnerable defense (namely, Dan Girardi, Andrej Sustr, Slater Koekkoek, and Braydon Coburn) and a talented forward group is something worth mediating on, especially come playoff time when skilled teams will eliminate the speed the Tampa Bay generates through the neutral zone. If the defensemen are left to fend for their own, it can allow them to forfeit territorial advantage. And that can lead to a bad result. Push a less-talented defenseman into a corner, and force him to do battle, and he may take a dumb penalty -- like Coburn did on James Neal, which led to the near buzzer-beater goal.