A shaky goaltending performance from Evgeni Nabokov made Saturday’s game between the Tampa Bay Lightning and the Columbus Blue Jackets closer than it probably had to be, but the Bolts did manage to skate away with a 7-4 victory, their fifth straight win. The ‘W’ moves Tampa’s record to 10-3-1, which is good enough for first place (!) in the Atlantic Division.
I mentioned in the pre-game blog that Columbus’s decision to start Anton Forsberg left them vulnerable to goals against. The Lightning didn’t hesitate when it came to taking advantage of the young Swede, as they piled up four goals on 15 shots in the first period alone.
J.T. Brown (!!!!!!) opened the scoring with his first goal of the season at the 5:46 mark of the first period. Able to find the puck in the slot, Brown banged the puck past Forsberg for the score. Assists on the goal were credited to Jason Garrison and Andrej Sustr.
The party continued only 21 seconds later when Cedric Paquette scored his third goal of the year with help from Jonathan Drouin and Vladislav Namestnikov. The ‘dump truck,’ as he’s affectionately known, followed up on a Drouin rebound and one-timed the puck past Forsberg to put the Lightning up 2-0.
They weren’t done there.
Anton Stralman scored a power play goal at 12:31 of the opening frame. His second of the year, assisted by Steven Stamkos and Ryan Callahan, was another goal where Stralman somehow found himself and the puck deep in the offensive zone. He had little trouble potting the biscuit for the 3-0 lead.
The fourth and final goal of that first stanza came about two minutes after Stralman scored. Another former New York Ranger, Brian Boyle, notched his fifth of the year with help from Brenden Morrow and Brown. That put the Lightning up 4-0, and really all but ended the game.
It’s hard to understate the importance of having depth in the NHL. In that first period alone, the Lightning got there goals from its bottom-six forwards and one goal from a defenseman. There was no Steven Stamkos bomb. There was no Valtteri Filppula dangle. Depth guys got the job done.
The two teams traded goals in a back-and-forth second period, with Scott Hartnell (x2), Ryan Callahan, and Tyler Johnson all scoring in the first half of the frame. It added up to an insurmountable 6-2 Lightning lead with 40 minutes in the books.
Some “unique… (read: questionable) goaltending from Nabokov early in the third period briefly made things interesting, as Ryan Johansen and Nick Foligno were able to pop tallies past the Tampa netminder to make it a 6-4 game. The Blue Jackets almost narrowed the deficit to one on a few memorable occasions, but their efforts were all for naught. Tyler Johnson scored his second of the game and fourth of the season into an empty net with 51 seconds left on the clock, and that was all she wrote. The game was over.
There likely won’t be many nights this season when the Lightning as a team score seven goals without at least one coming from Steven Stamkos, Valtteri Filppula, Ondrej Palat, or Nikita Kucherov. The depth on this team got the job done on Saturday, and the two points count just the same. Credit Ryan Callahan for generating three points, Jonathan Drouin for assisting on two goals, and J.T. Brown for finally breaking through. Those are the contributions this team is going to need if it wants to make a deep playoff run.
With this win in their back pocket, the Lightning will head to Detroit where they’ll face the Red Wings on Sunday evening. A rested Ben Bishop is expected to get the start in net as the Lightning look for their sixth (!) win in a row.
As always, thanks for reading.
Michael Stuart has been the Tampa Bay Lightning writer for HockeyBuzz since 2012. Visit his archive to read more or follow him on Twitter.