Lightning strike early and often as Flames’ slump continues
NHL’s best team dominates in home-ice triumph
TAMPA, Fla. — There have been moments during the Calgary Flames’ recent slump where you could have convinced yourself that if the puck just bounced a little differently, the results might have gone their way.
Tuesday night against the Tampa Bay Lightning (42-11-4) was not one of those times. No, the Flames’ 6-3 loss to the league’s best team didn’t come down to a hot goaltender or missed opportunities. The Lightning simply outplayed the Flames.
The hosts in Tampa outshot, outskated, outhit and all-around outclassed their visitors at Amalie Arena, and in the end the Flames (34-16-6) got exactly the result they deserved.
Suddenly, a Flames team that was the toast of the Western Conference heading into the all-star break is floundering. They’ve dropped points in four of their last five games and have allowed 21 goals in that stretch. On its own, a loss to the Lightning would be acceptable. They’re the best team in the league, after all, so beating teams is sort of just what they do.
But what was striking was how one-sided Thursday’s game was.
On the Lightning’s first power play of the game, they cycled the puck down to J.T. Miller, who fed an open Brayden Point out front for a quick one-timer at the 11:54 mark of the first period.
The next 5½ minutes saw the Lightning strike twice more, first when a screwy Flames line change led to Cedric Paquette slotting one in and then again when Nikita Kucherov floated a wrister from the point that made its way past a screened David Rittich.
At that point, there was no one in the rink who would have bet on the Flames making a miraculous comeback.
They had a little burst of life before the period was done when Mark Giordano scored on a two-man advantage — becoming the 10th defenceman in NHL history aged 35 or older to record 55 points in a single season.
Then, when Sean Monahan buried one nine minutes into the second, it felt for a moment like there might be some hope.
That feeling was shortlived.
Less than a minute after Monahan scored, Anthony Cirelli restored the Lightning’s two-goal lead, and then Yanni Gourde gave the Lightning a three-goal cushion at the 16:11 mark.
Steven Stamkos made it 6-2 five minutes into the third, but the writing had been on the wall for a while by then — although Monahan’s second of the night made the final score line slightly more respectable.
The Flames have been insisting that they’ve just got to keep showing up for work every day and putting in the work and that they believe the results will start going their way again.
A loss to the Lightning shouldn’t change that, but there’s no getting around the fact that their results in February have been worrying.
Nobody on the second-line has recorded a point in four games now, with Matthew Tkachuk and Michael Frolik each on the ice for two Lightning goals on Tuesday while Mikael Backlund was a minus-3.
Rittich might not have been at fault for most — if any — of the Lightning’s goals, but he didn’t come up with the heroic performance the Flames needed to try to stay in a game like this one, either.
Ultimately, the Flames have a chance to put this loss in the rear-view mirror on Thursday when they take on the Florida Panthers, but if they could tell themselves that their performances against the Sharks and Canucks deserved better than the results they got in those two games, they couldn’t say that on Tuesday night.