It can be easy in hockey to let a bad outcome on a play obscure good process. For instance, on the Jamie Benn breakaway that gave the Stars a 2-1 lead, Jan Rutta wanted to hold the blue line, so he attempted to heave the puck past the surging Benn. Unfortunately, Rutta hurled the puck right into Benn’s body. It was a costly misfire as Benn seized on the turnover to create a breakaway, exploiting Rutta’s attempt to keep the puck in the offensive zone. But while Rutta can be scolded for a turnover, his instincts were right.
The 3-2 loss in overtime wasn’t an admirable outing by the Lightning. The Bolts allowed 29 scoring chances at 5v5. The Stars finished with a 2.05 expected goals allowed, which is Tampa Bay’s 11th worst performance in that metric this season. There were examples of good and bad process, but overall the results were unsatisfying.
The Lightning need their defensemen playing strong at the blue line, and there were examples in the game that didn’t lead to Dallas goals but illustrate why the Lightning need their defensemen holding the zone. (Defensemen can only be as aggressive at the blue line as their forwards allow them to be, and Brayden Point getting outmuscled by Benn, which brought Point to a halt, didn’t do Rutta any favors.)
With 6: 05 remaining in the first period, Rutta’s refusal to retreat and courage to hold the blue line led to a scoring chance. Victor Hedman cut toward the slot from the weak side and fired a shot from the slot on Ben Bishop. On an excellent opportunity by Carter Verhaeghe two and a half minutes later, Rutta once again fortified the blue line, leading to Yanni Gourde feeding Verhaeghe in the low slot. While Verhaeghe didn’t score, he did draw a penalty on Roman Polak.
The only forward line that played well was that of Steven Stamkos-Point-Nikita Kucherov, and that trio had its hiccups. There was the first Benn goal; Kucherov’s turnover in the second period, which led to a three-on-one for the Stars; Point losing Joe Pavelski in coverage and it leading to a wide-open shot in the slot; and Stamkos coughing up the puck above the circle and ceding Mattias Janmark a breakaway. Still, the line finished +5 in shot attempts, and was the only one that created more than one high-danger chance. This line also notched the only 5v5 goals of the contest for the Lightning.
The Lightning turnovers by Stamkos and Kucherov strike at something that Jon Cooper mentioned in his interview with Pierre McGuire: not shooting the puck enough. The Stars did a good job of bottling up the Lightning forwards, but when there was a look from the off-slot or a sliver of space from above the circles, the Tampa Bay skaters would forgo that look in hopes of generating something better. (The culmination of this tendency was Gourde having a grade-A look on a two-on-one and still deciding to pass the puck.)
The Point line spent a lot of time in the offensive zone, but was bedeviled by this grass-is-greener mentality. One deadly consequence is not only that the scoring opportunity never comes again, but that the cycle leads to a bad decision and an odd-man rush. Less discriminate shooting destabilizes the defensive coverage, and the Kucherov goal is a great example. He lofted a shot from distance and Stamkos deflected it right before it reached Bishop. Shooting is a mechanism to create a better look, and it has the unintentional effect of preventing an offense from making a dumb decision and getting caught in an odd-man rush.
With the Blue Jackets and Panthers rattling off six-game win streaks, the cozy playoff position the Lightning occupied is no more. As well as the Lightning have played over their last 16 games, their margin of error is razor thin. They can do themselves a favor by shooting more and being more pragmatic in their puck management. And those two aspects go together.