Lack of early lift undercut surge

TAMPA — Lightning defenseman Victor Hedman helplessly watched the final minutes of Saturday's Leafs-Penguins game.

Tampa Bay needed a Toronto loss to bring meaning to Sunday's regular-season finale, a 4-2 victory over Buffalo. But the Leafs rallied for a 5-3 win that sealed the Lightning's fate. The preseason Stanley Cup favorites will be watching the playoffs at home for the first time since 2013.

“It's just an empty feeling when [the Leafs] scored that empty-net goal,” Hedman said. “Your season is over.”

The Lightning (42-30-10 for 94 points) tried to take the positives out of their equally remarkable and resilient run, its rookie-laden group going 18-6-5 after falling to last place in the Eastern Conference Feb. 4.

“We never folded,” Hedman said.

But players lamented what got them in such a big hole in the first place, a lack of urgency and consistency in the first half of the season.

Injuries, especially the one to captain Steven Stamkos, were costly. But a key culptrit was complacency. The last day Tampa Bay was in a playoff spot was Dec. 4. It's been chasing it ever since.

“It's the first half that put us in this situation,” defenseman Anton Stralman said.

“That's the time when maybe you don't realize where you are in the standings and you think you have time to figure it out. But when you put yourself in a hole like that and finish like we did and don't get in, it makes you realize you need that urgency right off and we didn't have that. That's why we're here.”

There were warning signs early on when the Lightning were winning during a 10-6-1 start. They fell behind by two goals in three of the first four games, winning two of them.

“I think it's a matter of coming together as a team and playing for one another instead of as individuals,” Stralman said. “The main reason why we had success as of late, we played as a team. Nobody goes out there on their own agenda. And when I look back at that first half, even though we won games early on I don't think we were playing good hockey. And that kind of gives you a false comfort. You win games and think you're doing well, and then when you get in the mode where you're still playing the same way and start losing, that's when it spirals downward. And that's what it did and then we got caught and can't find our way back. We were just in that place where we just tumbled around and couldn't find or game. And that's what cost us."

That makes two consecutive years the Lightning needed a significant second-half run to be in playoff contention. Tampa Bay needed nine- and seven-game winning streaks in 2015-16 to make the postseason with 97 points, ultimately reaching the Eastern Conference Final.

But the points in October count as much as they do in March. And a 1-5 record against the league's three worst teams — Arizona, Vancouver and Colorado — came back to haunt them. Maybe the sting of missing the playoffs will finally allow the message to sink in that complacency is costly.