Familiarity breeds success.
Cliché, for sure. Overused in certain situations without a doubt. Perhaps, even wrong in some circumstances.
But it was something the Lightning used as a rallying cry before the start of the season. After a season in which Tampa Bay advanced to the Stanley Cup Final, the summer brought almost zero roster turnover. Erik Condra was the only new face acquired and Brenden Morrow the only familiar face not brought back.
Lightning general manager Steve Yzerman felt the group of players returning earned the opportunity to give it another go. With everybody back, for the most part, the chemistry should have been evident from the start of the season as Tampa Bay looked to start a trek back to the Stanley Cup Final.
The Lightning are now one series victory from doing just that after dispatching the New York Islanders in five games following a 4-0 win on Sunday to advance to the Eastern Conference finals for the second consecutive season.
The path to get there, however, did not exactly go as planned.
Throughout the beginning of the season the Lightning struggled with consistency. After jumping out to a 3-0 start to the season, the short summer looked as if it was going to catch up with the players. The highest scoring team in the league was struggling to score goals. The Lightning were shutout in back-to-back games in October to Chicago and St. Louis after being shut out just once all of last season.
Then injuries started to deplete the lineup.
First it was Ondrej Palat, who went down with an ankle injury. Then it was Tyler Johnson, who missed 13 games with two separate injuries. Line combinations were jumbled. And for good portions of the first three months, the Lightning just looked off.
Jon Cooper: “…we had to survive without some important players on this team.’’ (Photo/Getty Images)
“I look back at this season and think about our struggles in the first 15-20 games, somewhere we had not been before,’’ Lightning head coach Jon Cooper said. “As far as we went last year, then coming back this year, maybe we were not as engaged in the regular season as we should have been. Then there was the injury portion and that was a long stretch to lose the Palat’s and the Johnson’s and go on down the list of who got hurt. In a weird way it was a refocus for us and we had to survive without some important players on this team.’’
For a majority of that stretch, Tampa Bay sat outside the playoff picture and kept losing ground. The Lightning looked in real danger of being one of the rare teams that reach the Final one season only to miss out on the playoffs all together the next.
Tampa Bay was looking up in the standings at Montreal, Ottawa, Boston, Detroit and Florida. The Lightning were not even in the top half of their division, let alone the playoff picture.
But as some of the health returned, the focus came with it and once the calendar flipped to 2016, Tampa Bay seemed to flip a switch. It started in January with a seven game winning streak and a stretch of 10 wins in 11 games that helped pulled the Lightning above water and back in to the playoff conversation. In February, a franchise record nine-game winning streak propelled them into the top part of the Atlantic Division to put the team back in a more comfortable position heading in to the final stretch.
The Hockey Gods, however, refused to make things easy on Tampa Bay after Anton Stralman went down with a fractured fibula on March 25. A week later captain Steven Stamkos was diagnosed with the same blood clot that kept goaltender Andrei Vasilevskiy sidelined for two months.
Neither player would be available to start the postseason, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t have an impact on why Tampa Bay has found playoff success.
“Steven Stamkos and Anton Stralman, they weren’t in these 10 games to help us advance, but we are not in the playoffs without those guys,’’ Cooper said. “That’s what made us a team (in the regular season) and that’s what helped us get to where we are now. Then when we got everybody back, that’s when we kind of kicked it in to gear. We made a couple of runs that catapulted us here and we knew what we could do and that’s what has put us in this position now. Obviously it’s not ideal to have the likes of Stamkos and Stralman on the sideline, but I think a year of preparation with injuries probably helped our mindset.’’
So entering the postseason, Tampa Bay was not going to let the absence of two key cogs in the machine serve an excuse for a poor postseason. Instead the Lightning have bonded together and became the first team since the 1987 Detroit Red Wings to be missing their leading goal scorer from the regular season and still advance past the second round of the playoffs.
Victor Hedman: “We try to put on a team effort every night.” (Photo/Christine Gunn)
“It takes a lot of character to face adversity like that,’’ said defenseman Victor Hedman, who set a franchise record for points in a series by a defenseman with eight. “But it seems like we go through something like this every year so to be able to put on a performance like we have so far is pretty impressive. For us it’s about everybody trying to step up their game in the playoffs and fill the absence of those two guys. We try to put on a team effort every night and make a difference.’’
What a difference that has made in keeping the season alive long enough to perhaps get back one, if not both, Stralman and Stamkos.
That’s the familiar lineup the Lightning hope breeds continued success.
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