In three of the past four seasons, the Lightning have been one of the top teams in the NHL.

Three years ago they were in the Stanley Cup Final, just two games away from winning the whole thing. They followed that up the next season by going all the way to Game 7 of the Eastern Conference finals only to lose a one-goal game on the road to a Penguins team that would go on to win the Stanley Cup. This season they finished the regular season as the top seed in the Eastern Conference and had the third-best record in the entire league, trailing only the Predators and Jets.

The one outlier season out of that group was 2016-17, when they fell short of the postseason by just a single point. It was a team that spent most of the season getting completely decimated by injuries at various times. Nikita Kucherov missed eight games. Jonathan Drouin missed nine. Ondrej Palat missed seven. Tyler Johnson 16. Brayden Point only played in 68. Anton Stralman missed nine. All of them are core players, and with the exception of Drouin, still are. And In Drouin’s case he was traded over the summer for another player — defenseman Mikhail Sergachev — who looks to be a core building block going forward.

All of those injuries hurt.

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But none of them hurt as much as the leg injury to Steven Stamkos that kept him out of all but 17 games that season. Before the injury, he was off to one of the best starts of his career, scoring nine goals and picking up 11 assists. He was playing incredible hockey. But for the third time in four years a significant injury sidelined him for a chunk of the season. In 2013-14 it was a broken leg. In 2015-16 it was a blood clot issue that kept him out the last two weeks of the regular season and all but one playoff game — Game 7 of the Eastern Conference finals. Then last season it was a knee injury.

When you combine all of that with the lockout that took away half of the 2012-13 season, Stamkos, 28, has missed a pretty significant chunk of his prime years in the NHL. In doing so, it almost seems as if we have forgotten just how good he is when he is healthy.

It is almost as if he has become the NHL’s forgotten superstar.

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With the second round of the Stanley Cup playoffs underway, all of the focus is on Sidney Crosby and Alex Ovechkin in their series involving the Penguins and Capitals.

It is on the Jets and Predators for their massive meeting in the Western Conference. Within that, Patrik Laine is the guy everyone focusses on because he looks like he is on his way to becoming the NHL’s dominant goal-scorer given the start he is off to in his career.

And even though their teams are out of it — or never even made the playoffs — we can't forget about the NHL’s other two young phenoms in Connor McDavid and Auston Matthews.

Even on Stamkos’ own team, he seems to have taken a backseat to Nikita Kucherov.

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On one hand, it’s understandable. All of the aforementioned players are outstanding and are very deserving of their places among the NHL’s elite. But Stamkos is still among that group, even if we don’t always seem to talk about it. Or realize it.

Keep something in mind here: During the 2011-12 season, Stamkos, as a 21-year-old, hit the 60-goal mark, finished with 97 points, and was second in the MVP voting, losing out only to Penguins superstar center Evgeni Malkin. At that point Stamkos was coming off a run that saw him top the 90-point mark in three consecutive years (the only player in the league to do that for those three seasons; only two other players had more than one), lead the league in goals in two of those years, and never score fewer than 45 goals. He was every bit as good, productive and dominant as any other player in the league.

After that was when he started missing games due to the lockout. And the injuries. And the blood clot issue.

In the games Stamkos has played since the end of the 2011-12 season, he has scored 169 goals and tallied 339 total points in 339 games. That 0.50 goals-per-game average is a 41-goal pace over 82 games — the fourth-best mark in the NHL during that stretch, trailing only Ovechkin, Laine and Matthews.

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He is one of only six players during that stretch (minimum 100 games played) to average at least a point per game, joining McDavid, Crosby, Malkin, Patrick Kane and Ryan Getzlaf. Only McDavid, Crosby, Malkin and Kane have a higher per-game average.

That is, obviously, pretty elite company, and a nice reminder as to just how dominant of an offensive player Stamkos still is. Just consider what he has done this season. Coming back from a significant knee injury, Stamkos finished the year as the 12th leading scorer in total points while also missing four games. He carried that over to the first round of the playoffs, with a five-game point streak that saw him reach the scoresheet in each of the Lightning’s first-round games against the Devils.

All of the injuries in recent years created a lot of pretty big “what-ifs” for him and the Lightning. What would his overall production look like had he not missed 120 regular season games? What would the Lightning have been able to do had he been healthy for the 2016 playoffs? Keep in mind, they played the first six games of the Eastern Conference finals that year against the Penguins without him, losing one of those games in overtime.

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What would have happened had he not missed most of the 2016-17 season? Surely a healthy Stamkos would have helped the Lightning make up the one point in the standings to reach the playoffs. Given how week the Atlantic Division was, it is not out of the question to think that with a healthy Stamkos, and especially with the way they closed out the regular season, that they could have potentially gone on a deep run in the playoffs. It’s not like the Ottawa team that came out of the Atlantic bracket and went to double overtime in Game 7 of the Eastern Conference finals was anything special.

With a healthy Stamkos this season, we have been reminded what they are both capable of.

Stamos had another outstanding individual season. That, combined with Kucherov and their complementary cast of offensive talent, the Lightning were again one of the best teams in the league and are a legitimate Stanley Cup contender entering their second-round series against the Bruins.

He may not be talked about as much as the NHL’s other superstars, but when it comes to production and his ability to impact his team, Stamkos is right there with just about anybody else in the NHL.