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After a three-day, two-game sweep in the Sunshine State battle at the hand of the Florida Panthers, the Tampa Bay Lightning have every right to be utterly frustrated (and then some).
In their Saturday defeat at Amalie, the Bolts collapse to the Panthers’ late game power-play pressure before ultimately falling in a shootout, a 5-4 final in favor of Roberto Luongo and the ‘Cats. It was a game that you could stomach losing given the back-and-forth nature of the contest, and it’s sort of an unwritten rule of fans and teams alike to not get bent out of a shape about shootout losses.
But there’s almost no moral victory to take from Monday’s debacle in Sunrise.
At the risk of sounding hyperbolic, Tampa Bay’s 1-0 loss on Monday night -- with Aaron Ekblad playing hero once again, this time with the go-ahead goal with 20 seconds left in the third -- is nearly impossible to fathom. The Bolts doubled up the Panthers in shots and utterly dominated the pace of play for the full 60 minutes. But they just couldn’t beat Luongo. Not after ripping him for four goals on 28 shots just 48 hours prior. That’s … strangely fitting for this year’s squad, I suppose.
I’ll maintain the belief that it’s still entirely too early for the Bolts to panic.
Although many of the Bolts’ stars from a year ago are having trouble finding the back of the cage -- top-six winger Nikita Kucherov is a prime example of this, with just five goals on 56 shots peppered on opposing netminders this season -- you have a feeling that the puck-luck will return.
Forwards Jonathan Drouin, Tyler Johnson, and Cedric Paquette all missed Monday’s game with various injuries that the club has deemed ‘day-to-day’ for now, while Ondrej Palat remains out of action. Those are four impact players the Lightning do not have right now. And you assume -- or hope, maybe -- that the team will inch closer towards a fully clean bill of health.
The Bolts have a solid budding top-line look in the Stamkos-Kucherov duo, and Vladislav Namestnikov has really looked like a player coming into his own in a top-six role. And for a team that rolled with an AHLer fourth line last night, the Bolts didn’t look completely terrible.
Yet, I think it’s fair to wonder just what’s happening to this team.
There does seem to be a hangover effect of sorts circling over this group that nearly pushed the Chicago Blackhawks to the brink in last year’s Cup Final, at least to begin the season. And Jon Cooper’s clearly a man trying to push any and every button with his combinations -- both up front and on the back-end -- to figure out exactly what’s ailing this team. And right now, there’s no clear answer.
It’s within those final minutes of close games that you feel a bit more anxious. You can almost sense the chaos around the Tampa net, and their worry that something -- anything -- will go wrong.
And that sense of dread was valid, too, with Florida’s game-winner banking off a Tampa leg and in.
In essence, the bounces just are not there right now.
You have to figure that changes.
But you also have to wonder what else changes -- either from the coach or GM -- before that comes.
Ty Anderson has been covering the National Hockey League for HockeyBuzz.com since 2010, has been a member of the Pro Hockey Writers Association's Boston Chapter since 2013, and can be contacted on Twitter, or emailed at Ty.AndersonHB[at]gmail.com.