The Tampa Bay Lightning meet the New Jersey Devils in what figures to be as genuine a representation of the conference-leader-meets-wild-card matchup as we’ve seen. This isn’t a pretty strong No. 1 seed meeting a known commodity that happened to drop to the wild-card spot. It’s Nikita Kucherov and Steven Stamkos, who have been dominating the rest of the league since day one, meeting a Devils team that looked more likely to finish as the league’s first 31st team than an eventual champion.

New Jersey’s rise has been one of the season’s best stories, as it’s ridden Taylor Hall’s MVP-calibre campaign all the way to its first playoff appearance in six years. But the Devils have their work cut out for them in the Lightning who, though they wilted in the season’s second half, still remain one of the most dangerous clubs in the post-season.

Tampa’s greatest strength just happens to be the Devils’ Achilles heel — offensive depth. While Hall’s 93 points sit 41 higher than the team’s next scorer, 19-year-old rookie Nico Hischier, the Bolts will roll out Kucherov (100 points), Stamkos (86), Brayden Point (66) and Yanni Gourde (64), all of whom also have at least 25 goals on the year.

New Jersey swept the season series against the Lightning, but that’s a bit misleading when it comes to projecting how these two stack up against each other — the Devils squeaked by with one-goal wins every time, and were outshot in all three games, most notably in the second meeting, which saw Tampa Bay fall despite amassing 51 shots to the Devils’ 28.

If Keth Kinkaid continues his standout year and the Lightning’s stars stumble in the bright lights of the playoffs, the Devils can put together an epic first-round upset. But if things keep going as they have when the two clubs have met so far, you have to assume things eventually swing Tampa Bay’s way over the course of a seven-game stretch.

ADVANCED STATS

5-on-5 via Corsica.Hockey

Tampa Bay: 51.62 CF% (7th), 57.18 GF% (1st), .929 SP% (5th), 9.35 SH% (1st), 102.28 PDO (1st)

New Jersey: 48.63 CF% (21st), 48.77 GF% (17th), .917 SP% (25th), 7.91 SH% (11th), 99.64 PDO (19th)

POWER NUMBER

Determined by percentiles created for a variety of statistics and weighed equally to give each team a grade out of 10 for offence and defence (seven for 5-on-5 and three for special teams). These numbers are then averaged to come up with a power number to measure a team’s all-around play.

TEAM OFFENCE (rank) DEFENCE (rank) POWER NUMBER (rank) Tampa Bay 9.10 (2nd) 5.20 (14th) 7.15 (2nd) New Jersey 3.57 (24th) 3.38 (26th) 3.47 (26th)

TEAM STATS

Tampa Bay: 23.9 PP% (3rd), 76.1 PK% (28th), 290 GF (1st), 234 GA (13th)

New Jersey: 21.4 PP% (9th), 81.8 PK% (7th), 243 GF (14th), 240 GA (17th)

HEAD-TO-HEAD RECORD

Tampa Bay: 0-2-1

New Jersey: 3-0-0

Tampa Bay Lightning Outlook: Nobody could beat Tampa Bay at the start of the season, as they went 27-8-2 from October through December. But while they’ve still been a difficult team in the second half (26-15-3) team defence has become a problem.

In their last 44 games, Tampa Bay has allowed the sixth-most shots in the league, turning one-time Vezina Trophy favourite Andrei Vasilevskiy human again—the Russian has a pedestrian .907 save percentage in 2018, a flip from the .935 rate he had in the season’s first half.

The good news is the offence is as strong as ever with 148 goals scored in their past 44 games (3.4 average), led by Hart Trophy candidate Nikita Kucherov and Steven Stamkos, who is quietly having his best season in six years. The Lightning are also the most potent offensive team at even strength, leading the league in 5-on-5 goals. The pace at which they play and the waves of offence they can throw at teams thanks to great secondary options such as J.T. Miller and Brayden Point is difficult for any team to match against. But how far they go in the playoffs might be determined by their play at the other end of the ice.

New Jersey Devils Outlook: One of the best stories in the league this season, the Devils benefitted from a strong 11-4-2 start, but they haven’t coasted into the playoffs. On the contrary, the Devils faced a difficult six-game road trip in mid-March that included games against Nashville, Vegas, Pittsburgh and the three California teams, which could have been the disaster that allowed the streaking Florida Panthers to catch up. But New Jersey managed to go 4-2-0 in those games, then won two in a row upon returning home. The road trip turned out to be a defining moment for the young team.

Taylor Hall is the top story for the Devils, a strong Hart Trophy candidate with a 42-point lead on the second-highest New Jersey scorer. But the kids have also been key contributors, including rookies Nico Hischier, Will Butcher and Jesper Bratt, who make up three of the team’s top five scorers.

These Devils don’t play anything close to the style the franchise is linked to from the Dead Puck Era days. They are fast, loose and frequently playing back-and-forth action. This puts pressure on the goaltenders, which is another area of interest. Usual starter Cory Schneider has had difficulty getting back to form following a groin injury and hasn’t won a game since Dec. 27. In his place, Keith Kinkaid has taken over the lead role, playing both halves of back-to-back sets three times within the past month. He also started each of the six games on the aforementioned road trip and has a .925 save percentage since March.

Lightning X-Factor: One of the best power plays in the league is offset by a penalty kill that ranks among the worst. With a 76.2 per cent kill rate, Tampa’s PK is the second-worst among all playoff teams, ahead of only the extremely streaky Philadelphia Flyers. Since Feb. 1 it’s gotten even worse—they rank 30th in that time with a putrid 71.3 per cent kill rate.

Special teams are hugely important in the post-season and last year’s Pittsburgh Penguins were the only champions in the past 10 years who finished the regular season with a PK rate lower than 80 per cent—and even they were at 79.8. If you’re looking for a weakness of this contender, here it is.

Devils X-Factor: Kinkaid’s heroics are mentioned above, but when it comes to playoff hockey the 28-year-old is completely untested at the NHL level. In the pros in general, he has one series under his belt, in which the AHL’s Albany Devils were swept in 2014. The Devils are playing with house money this playoff season, as they’re a couple years ahead of schedule. And they probably didn’t envision getting here with Kinkaid.

But this is a team with nothing to lose and a goaltending with everything to prove—if Kinkaid continues to shine and leads New Jersey to Round 2, the hockey world will look at him and his team much differently.

TEAM LEADERS (G-A-PTS)

Tampa Bay: Nikita Kucherov (39-61-100), Steven Stamkos (27-59-86), Brayden Point (32-34-66)

New Jersey: Taylor Hall (39-54-93), Nico Hischier (20-32-52), Kyle Palmieri (24-20-44)