6
0
Lightning run ends with unfinished business.
COL-2
TB-1
Colorado wins the series 4-2.
Andrei Vasilevskiy allowed two goals on 30 shots for the loss. Maybe could’ve done better on the Lehkonen goal, but honestly the team in front of him has to give him more than one goal of support.
First Period
3:48 TB Stamkos (11), (Palat)
Second Period
1:54 COL MacKinnon (13), (Byram, Landeskog)
12:28 COL Lehkonen (8), (MacKinnon, Manson)
Third Period
NO SCORING
Steven Stamkos was the game’s third star.
There’s two ways of looking at this. One is that yes the Avalanche had a youth and athleticism advantage and they ultimately ran the Lightning out of gas, especially in the Third Period. The Avs simply weren’t made to pay for employing a goaltender of questionable quality as the Lightning could only amass 23 shots on goal. That’s not good enough, nor is getting just one goal on a goaltender that had a sub-.900 save percentage for the series.
At the same time, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a team have more buzzard’s luck than the Lightning did in this series and they still basically lost three of the four games by one goal. The last seven Avalanche goals in this series came either from puck luck or by questionable officiating, with tonight’s coming from a blown call touching up a delayed penalty (Nick Paul, replays showed, touched the puck TWICE in the sequence) and a missed hooking call that created a 3-on-2 (Bellemare got tossed to the ice).
And this is where the unfinished business part comes in. In spite of all that and in spite of the fact they pretty much lost Brayden Point for 80% of this playoff run and they had weird things happen like Anthony Cirelli getting his bicep stepped on by Alex Killorn just as he was starting to become the Lightning’s most dominant forward in the series they still came within two wins of a championship with two of their losses coming in OT and a third coming in a one goal regulation game. It doesn’t even take a drastic butterfly effect change of events to put the Lightning in the winner circle again in this series. And that’s the roughest part. Didn’t feel like the team lost to the Avalanche. Not really. Lost to the Avalanche and a confluence of other things including the fact that NHL officials somehow lost the ability to master the basics like calling touch ups and icings properly. Lost to some hellaciously bad puck luck.
With that said, Colorado had a speed and athleticism edge the Lightning need to address this offseason. The team’s got to get a little younger and faster, no doubt. It may take a couple of years to modestly remodel the lineup around the core with youth to get back into a position to try to win another Cup. They need prospects like Nick Perbix, Cole Koepke, and Gage Goncalves to become more than marginal contributors in the NHL, in my opinion, to flesh out a roster still challenged by the salary cap. Any kind of second act really depends on it.
As for where this three year run puts this team in NHL history, unfortunately knowing the bias of the northern hockey media I know the Lightning will never get their just due for what they’ve accomplished and how good they are until they run down a third Cup with this group. The venom started coming out after Game Two of this series when the pathetic old tropes about “bubble cup” and “$18M over the cap” were resuscitated from their tombs. Are they one of the great teams of all time? Yes. Are they a dynasty? The last eight years have absolutely been as dynastic as anything teams that have been fawned over by the media like Detroit and Pittsburgh have put together. In an era that included a flat cap because of COVID which makes what they’ve done that much more difficult/impossible. Will the Lightning get that same level of respect as a Detroit or Pittsburgh team got? A team from Tampa, Florida? Of course not. So, like I said, there’s unfinished business to cement their legacy properly. The good news is, this team gets it. They don’t get fat on the banquet circuit anymore. They stay hungry.
Box score and extended statistics from NHL.com.
