Alan Truex: Lightning gets President’s Trophy. But Stanley Cup??
The Tampa Bay Lightning may be one of the two or three greatest teams in the history of the National Hockey League. But there are too many times when they don’t look like the best team this year.
One of those occasions was Saturday night, in their own arena, where the defending Stanley Cup champions, the Washington Capitals, bashed them 6-3. The loss ended the Lightning’s hope of catching the 1976-77 Montreal Canadiens for the best record ever.
More troubling: Tampa’s Victor Hedman, who last season won the Norris Trophy as the best defenseman in the league, left the game at the end of the first period with the all-defining “upper body injury.” He was hit in the chin by the helmet of Washington’s Carl Hagelin, and coach Jon Cooper would not rule out concussion.
Cooper said Monday that Hedman will not play the rest of the regular season and would not commit beyond that.
Brian Lawton, former NHL player and general manager, said on NHL Network: “Hedman is the catalyst who drives things on a nightly basis. If he’s not back for the playoffs, that would significantly change things.” Lawton at the trade deadline had advocated for the team adding a defenseman: “That was the one area where they were susceptible.”
The NHL has a lamentable but perhaps justifiable tradition of obfuscation on injuries.
The reason for the secrecy and vagueness is that this is the only team sport where players wield a blade while tangling with one another.
If a player knows his adversary has a sprained ankle, for example, he might be inclined to whack the injury to make it worse. Yeah, they play dirty in the NHL. Oops, sorry, I was trying to scoop the puck.
So we don’t know what’s hurting Hedman or when he can play with whatever is hurting. No news here is probably good news. If he has a serious sort of fracture, word probably would have leaked out.
Needless to say, the Lightning were weakened by Hedman’s departure. But this team wasn’t real good even when the Norris star was playing.
Steven Stamkos, Tampa Bay captain, was blunt and accurate: “Whether we’re playing Washington, Boston, Toronto, whatever, you play the way we did the first period tonight, you’re not going to win.”
And yet, as the game went on, there were moments of special brilliance that you see with Tampa every night and, with the other teams, not so often. When inspired — as they strangely were not for a matchup with the Cup holders – this is a team of quick, relentless forecheckers, constantly agitating the foe.
The Lightning can strike at any time; they lead the league with 10 shorthanded goals.
After they were down 3-0 in the first period Saturday, they began playing, for the most part, like they’re supposed to play. You had to admire the swift decisiveness of the 5-foot-8 American, Tyler Johnson, as he stickhandled the puck away from the Caps and scored on a breakaway against Braden Holtby.
As for Tampa’s All-Star goalie, Andrei Vasilevskiy, he made 29 saves but should have made one or two more. He’s not taking much media criticism, but he’s in a slump at the worst time of the season. He’s allowed 18 goals in four games, saving .867.
The mood at Amalie Arena seemed, from TV observation, to be rather subdued on Fan Appreciation Night, even though it began well, with ceremonial acknowledgement of the Lightning clinching the league’s best regular-season record.
That happened with nine games left on the schedule, which gives you an idea of how much better they are than the rest of the NHL.
So at center ice Stamkos was presented the President’s Trophy, though not by the President himself. Perhaps he sees Florida as solid red and hockey with not enough media coverage to make the trip worthwhile.
Standing in for the President was NHL Deputy Commissioner Bill Daly, who was also standing in for Commissioner Gary Bettman, aka The Invisible Hand. The trophy is a creatively designed 2-foot-tall sculpture of a saucer mounted on hockey sticks. Stamkos admiringly touched it and then carried it to the team’s bench.
That action alarmed superstitious bystanders who felt he could be jinxing the team. When trophies are awarded at the conference championships, most players refuse to touch them. It’s as if doing so will detract from the value of what is the ultimate prize – perhaps in all of sports — the Stanley Cup.
There were other historic flourishes to Saturday night’s game. Alex Ovechkin scored his 50th goal, and then his 51st.
The reigning Stanley Cup champions were physically dominant – Tom Wilson a raging beast, as he usually is. The Caps camped out at the Tampa goalmouth. They attack in waves; it’s far more than Ovechkin. Nicklas Backstrom is the seventh player on this Washington team to score 20 goals.
Yet the Capitals have their issues. They’re 17th in goals against. Holtby is good-not-great; the defense in front of him was sharp against the Lightning but has been sloppy on other occasions.
Perhaps the Boston Bruins match up better – tighter defensively and even more physical. The Bruins are 1-2 against the Lightning this season, with their losses by one goal and their win by three. Boston ends its regular season at home against the Lightning. That game probably will have little significance, except for the confidence it will bring to the winner. As talented a hockey team as Tampa Bay has, it looks more vulnerable now than a week ago.
