Lightning trying to get mojo back
CHICAGO— It didn’t take the sound of a door slamming in the visitors’ dressing room Saturday night to sense this Lightning team is frustrated.
Tampa Bay players believed they had worked hard against the Minnesota Wild — at least, harder than they did in Thursday’s lethargic loss to the Vegas Golden Knights— yet they dropped another game. That makes five losses in the past seven. More telling, the team has lost its swagger.
“We’re out of sync,” coach Jon Cooper put it. “The guys didn’t forget how to play hockey in the last week and a half.”
But they forgot how to play it together.
Gone is that mojo Nikita Kucherov often talked about in the first half of the season, when the Lightning appeared to be running away with the Eastern Conference. Now their Atlantic Division lead has shrunk to three points, thanks to a surging Boston Bruins team that just might be the class of the conference right now.
It’s not time to hit the panic button, but it’s getting closer.
“We didn’t get where we are today by fluke,” Cooper said. “But we’ve got better in us, we know that.”
The Lightning (31-12-3) better show it quickly, with this telling eightgame trip that continues in Chicago Monday. And the Lightning will have to do it without winger Ondrej Palat, who is back in Tampa and out indefinitely with a lower-body injury.
“It’s really going to test our will and commitment and compete to go into those buildings and have a good game and get wins,” defenceman Dan Girardi said. “We’ve got to stop the bleeding.”
Cooper is right. The Lightning didn’t soar to the top of the standings by a fluke. This is a really talented team, boasting elite scorers in Kucherov and Steven Stamkos, and an all-star goalie in Andrei Vasilevskiy.
But Tampa Bay isn’t without flaws. Vasilevskiy was able to mask a lot of them with his brilliant play in the first half of the season, but when he’s mortal, those warts are revealed.
The Lightning have issues on the back end, and those are exacerbated with the injury absence of 2017 Norris Trophy finalist Victor Hedman.
They are working hard to fix their problems, and the fact they have had just three practices since late December hasn’t helped. But players aren’t on the same page; with frustration mounting, the collective confidence has taken a dip.
“Things were definitely going our way at the beginning of the year,” winger Alex Killorn said. “We were earning those bounces, but things were definitely going our way. You play in this league long enough, (you) realize there are going to be highs and lows. It’s just a matter of working your way out of them.”