With this mucky, greasy goal by Anthony Cirelli in overtime of Game Six -- which was partly a reward from the hockey gods for his persistent hard work -- my Tampa Bay Lightning dispatched the New York Islanders to win the NHL's Eastern Conference Championship and earn a trip to the Stanley Cup Finals.
It feels so good to type that sentence after they came so close in 2016 and 2018, dropping Game Seven of the conference finals each time, and of course after their shocking first-round exit in 2019.
This marks the franchise's second trip to the SCF in the last five calendar years and third in the last sixteen. The Lightning won the Cup in 2004 by defeating Calgary in seven, but came up short in 2015 when they fell to Chicago in six. My blog did not exist in 2004 but did in 2015, and if you're interested you can go here and here to read what I had to say after that year's run ended.
The Bolts have now made six trips to the Eastern Conference Finals in their 27-year history, and five of those trips have been in the past decade. Interestingly, this year's ECF was the first one for the Bolts that did not go the full seven games.
Obviously they've won half of the ECF's in which they have appeared. As of this moment they have also won half of their SCF's -- but with this season's SCF set to begin this evening, here's hoping they find a way to up their percentage from .500 to .667!
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I really want to spend a lot of time writing about the Lightning's win over the Islanders, and how they have performed overall through the first three rounds. But I also want to publish this today, and I have a life to live, so time doesn't really allow me to write "a lot" (and I'm sure you're not disappointed about that, seeing as how I tend to drone on and on).
I am very pleased by how this team has shown the character to march this far through through the post-season gauntlet in the face of serious challenges and injuries. Steven Stamkos has not played a single contest, and Jan Rutta has played just one. Ryan McDonagh and Brayden Point have both missed games and so has Erik Cernak. Nikita Kucherov missed the final two-thirds of the decisive gave against Boston in the second round. And in a league where goaltender platooning has for several years been the modus du jour for playoff success, Tampa Bay is the only club that has not given its starter a single second off throughout this entire unprecedented post-season in the bubble(s).
The gauntlet through which the Lightning has fought consists of three opponents who play absolutely stellar defense, namely the Columbus Blue Jackets, Boston Bruins, and of course the New York Isladers. The Bruins had the best record in the NHL during the regular season, and made it all the way to Game Seven of the SCF last season, and were picked by many to win it all this year. But the Lightning defeated them in five games, after also defeating Columbus in five and before taking care of business against the Isles.
The Lightning have played six overtime games during this run, and won five of them.
In each series, they have been the noticeably better team at even strength and have managed to prevail despite being shockingly unproductive on the power play.
Their penalty kill has been damn good, especially in the clutchest of situations.
They are getting key contributions from all four forward lines and from every single defenseman.
Victor Hedman has been near-perfect and has scored nine goals, putting him within reach of the all-time record for most goals by a defenseman in one post-season. That record is twelve, set by Paul Coffey in 1985, while Brain Leetch holds second place with eleven playoff goals in 1994; Hedman's tally of nine ties him for third place with none other than Bobby Friggin' Orr (1969).
Hedman, Point, and Andrei Vasilevskiy (.931 save percentage, 1.82 goals-against average) have played well enough to take home the Conn Smythe.
Nikita Kucherov Himself has rung up a gaudy stat line with 26 points in the team's 19 post-season contests (including the play-in round) and yet nobody is even talking about it! How insane is that?
Kuch has rung that number up while playing sound defense and bringing the salt and vinegar. He has mixed it up physically and refused to take crap from opposing players who take cheap shots and dole out gratuitous slashes intended to injure his hands (yes, I'm taking about you Jean-Gabriel Pageau).
This is all very good.
As far as the specific ECF win over the Isles is concerned, I won't recap it all here but I will say how awesome it was to see the Bolts win in so many ways when the pressure was boiling: They won big (8-2 in Game One)... and they won by making it look big when the game was actually played about even (4-1 in Game Four)... and they won with the timeliest of scoring (Kuch netting the winner with less that nine seconds remaining in Game Two)... and they won with the second-and-third-most-timely scoring (Blake Coleman tied Game Four just 15 seconds after the Isles got the opening goal, then Ondrej Palat scored to put the Bolts ahead a mere 12 seconds after Coleman's marker)... and they won in overtime in an elimination game (see the opening paragraph of this post)... and they won games that were heavy on defense, as well as games that were heavy on offense, as well as games in which the goaltending seemed impregnable... and they prevailed in the series despite scoring the first goal in only one of the six tilts.
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But of course, not everything is sunshine and puppy dogs. That just ain't possible in hockey, or in sports in general, or in life itself. There are always warning signs and things to be concerned about, no matter who you are.
After each of the first two rounds I inveighed about how bad the Bolts have been at face-offs, and unfortunately it did not get any better in the ECF. Part of the reason they went 0-for-5 on the power play in Game Six was that they couldn't win a draw, so they kept having to start off going in the wrong direction before they could even gain possession of the puck. Obviously, you need to have possession before you can even think about entering the neutral zone, much less the offensive zone, so losing power play face-offs means precious time drains off the clock and gets wasted.
Of the eleven Lightning players to have taken draws this post-season, only two are above 50 percent while one (Coleman) is at exactly 50. Meanwhile, three are below 34 percent while the other five are hovering between 43 and 49. The team has gotten this far with these poor numbers, but I have a hard time believing it can climb the final peak without improving in this metric -- not because face-offs are always important, but because their importance elevates in the kind of situations that tend to make all the difference in the world when the grail is in sight (i.e., on special teams, in your defensize zone with the game tied, late in games, etc.)
Also, although the Bolts' penalty kill has been very effective, they still find themselves having to kill far too many penalties. More to the point, they commit penalties at the worst possible times, and there has been one insanely stupid one (see Killorn, Alex) which resulted in an ejection and forced the team to play an entire game down to just nine forwards when somebody else got injured. This must stop or it will be their undoing.
And lastly, we must pray that Andrei Vasilevskiy does not get injured. Because if he does, it means that 37-year-old Curtis McElhinney will take over in net after having played not one second of hockey these playoffs and after having been exceedingly average (.906, 2.89) during the regular season that got corona-stopped more than six months ago.
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And last but not least, there are the Dallas Stars. They have been unbelievably impressive this post-season and I am hard-pressed to think of too many reasons they don't deserve to win it all.
From their outstanding team D, to their daunting top line, to their newfound depth in scoring, to the blueline wizardry of Miro Heiskanen, to their mix of veterans and youth, to the feel-good story of Anton Khudobin performing like he's on the same level as Patrick Roy... they are exactly where they belong right now.
To say nothing of the fact that their head coach, Rick Bowness, was an assistant for the Lightning from 2013 through 2018 -- which means he knows an awful lot about many of the Lightning players' tendencies, and just how to counteract them and get under their skin. This gives the Stars something of an edge; I simply don't know how much of an edge it is.
But both teams are capable of winning in this first-ever Stanley Cup Final to feature two teams from the geographical Deep South.
Here's hoping that the team that winds up triumphant is the Tampa Bay Lightning. Go Bolts!
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