Tampa Bay needs to gather themselves after Saturday’s 6-2 loss

“We lost 6-2. It doesn’t matter how we feel about how we played.”

Coach Jon Cooper doesn’t like to go negative in press conferences. Pick a home Lightning loss during the regular season, and Cooper will point to areas where the Lightning played better than the score. He’ll talk about the team’s competitive level, or a line that played particularly well. On Saturday evening, when asked about Tampa Bay’s play in their 6-2 loss to the Boston Bruins, that first part of his response was almost John McKay-esque in its disappointed simplicity.

Oh, certainly the Lightning had moments where they seemed to be in firm control of the game’s pace, and Tampa Bay’s players aren’t necessarily wrong to say the game felt closer than the lopsided final score implies. Still, there are no style points in the Stanley Cup Playoffs.

“Is there stuff we can build on from this game? No question, but they got six.”

The Lightning’s Close Calls

In the first and second periods, the pace of play was dominated by Tampa Bay. The Lightning controlled the puck for the bulk of those two periods, earning numerous scoring chances. This is the first thing many people will point to when breaking down the Bolts’ performance, as it suggests the loss was not as bad as it seems.

“Besides the score, I thought we played pretty well,” said Steven Stamkos after the game. “We had close to 40 shots, and he made some saves. Gotta give credit where credit’s due.”

“I don’t necessarily think it was a 6-2 game.”

Playing devil’s advocate for a moment, the problem could be said to be finishing. It seemed as though the Lightning were struggling with puckhandling at the worst possible times, whiffing on or otherwise mishandling opportunities that otherwise could have been typical Tampa Bay goals.

There are two teams on the ice, of course, and Tuukka Rask is largely responsible for this lack of finishing. Sometimes, a goalie just stands on his head and there is nothing a team can do. Rask was effectively in that mode, at least when his equipment wasn’t actively failing him. He had some dangerous opportunities sized up, and controlled the game in a lot of ways.

Rask wasn’t the sole reason the Lightning struggled to put the puck in the net. The puckhandling issue was real, if a bit out of character for a Lightning team that generally doesn’t have to worry about finishing on offense. Nikita Kucherov had an early look on Rask that could have led to a goal, but he missed the puck and scrambled just to keep it in the offensive zone. There were multiple opportunities in front of the net where it seemed like the Lightning had trouble putting stick on rubber, and it made Rask’s work slightly easier if no less impressive.

The optimist looks at this aspect of the game and says, rightly, that Tampa Bay played the game they wanted to play for the first forty minutes, even if they did not get the desired result. To a degree that could be true, at least in that the Lightning will be difficult to beat if they continue to set up on offense like that.

The pessimist, or in their words realist, might point out that the Bruins responded to an aggressive first two periods from the Lightning with patience, allowing Rask to do his thing and then taking advantage of any opportunities they had. In the end, it doesn’t much matter that the Bruins only had a few opportunities on offense. They converted on nearly every one of them. The amount of energy the Lightning had to spend just to find themselves down a goal through two periods is more than concerning.

Bruins’ Top Line Mauls Bolts

“Look at the backdoor play [Pastrnak] made to Jake in game seven (against) Toronto. That’s, typically in the past he’s probably looked to pound that.”

Bruins’ head coach Bruce Cassidy was effusive in his praise of Boston’s featured scorer David Pastrnak, who wound up with four assists on the afternoon. The top line of Pastrnak, Patrice Bergeron and Brad Marchand flooded the score sheet, combining for eleven points on the day. This is especially impressive given how little those three players had the puck in the offensive zone.

“They didn’t (get many chances),” said coach Cooper after the game. “They scored on pretty much every one they had.”

The top line, and especially Pastrnak, need to become a point of focus for the Lightning defensemen. While Tampa Bay did manage to keep the puck away from them for much of the game, when that top Boston line held the puck they were lethal. At times it was as though they couldn’t miss.

Frustration Sets In

Playoff hockey can be flat out cruel. There is no getting around that. What happened to the Lightning on Saturday is a typical result: One team plays the game they wanted to play and comes away with very little, the other hardly seems to have to puck and runs away with it. That’s playoff hockey. It happens on every level of the game.

From Ryan McDonagh after the game: “That’s how the playoffs work. You think it’s going alright, and you’re playing well, and they only need one look and one little bounce to go their way.”

After the proceedings, this experience might be why the locker room did not seem particularly frustrated. Everyone in it has had a game exactly like this before. Alex Killorn played in them twice a year in college.

During the third period, though, that frustration was visible. The Lightning chased, they pressed, and the Bruins dominated in the third as a result. Boston scored three goals in the final twenty minutes, including an empty-netter with more than six minutes left in the hockey game.

The reason the net was empty was pure frustration. So little was working for Tampa Bay that, on a third period power play, Jon Cooper opted to push his advantage with an extra skater. As pulling the goalie will do, this resulted in an easy goal for the opponent.

While it is no fun for fans of a team to watch them press and chase like that, the Lightning’s frustration was of a healthy variety. In a lot of cases, the team in that position starts committing penalties that come back to haunt later in the series as things get more and more chippy. The Lightning avoided this, never letting little skirmishes around the goals escalate. In particular, there was no back-and-forth with Brad Marchand, something that seemed to frustrate him in kind. At one point he actively threw his stick in the direction of a Lightning player.

“I hope it’s a little bit of a wake up call,” said McDonagh.

2 Us, 2 Ks, 1 Skate

In the second period, the Lightning got what some would call a controversial goal when Tuukka Rask’s left skate fell apart on him. Rask seemed to believe that play should be stopped once he lost his skate, immediately going to referees in a fury after the goal to show them his broken skate.

As it turns out, there is no rule on the books that play ought to be stopped in this situation. In the case of a blown skate, play continues. This happens to goalies so infrequently that the rule is no different for them than any other player. Thus, play was not stopped.

The rule itself is a bit questionable, and seems like something that could come up for potential change in the offseason. It would be hard to argue against a new rule saying play should be stopped when a goalie can no longer move to make saves.

In the meantime, make no mistake: The goal was 100% valid, clean, and The Striped Ones accurately enforced the rulebook.