The Tampa Bay Lightning have a problem. A very big problem. They essentially waltzed through the National Hockey League regular season compiling 62-16-4 and 128 points. They ran away with the President’s Trophy awarded to the team with the best record in the league. They smoked the second place teams, beating the Boston Bruins and the Western Conference regulars season champion Calgary Flames by 21 points. Their playoff series with the Columbus Blue Jackets started as expected with Tampa opening up a 3-0 first period lead.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Since then the wheels have fallen off. After the Lightning’s torrid Game 1 start they allowed four unanswered goals as the Columbus Blue Jackets took an upset 4-3 victory. Even with that result, there wasn’t too much concern–Game 1 upsets are common in a highly competitive sport like hockey. The real problem came in Game 2 when the Lightning were completely dominated by Columbus as the Blue Jackets coasted to a 5-1 win. Columbus opened up a 3-0 lead after two periods before Mikhail Sergachev scored early in the third to get Tampa on the board. Translated–the best team in hockey gave up 7 unanswered goals on their home ice to the Eastern Conference #8 seed. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
In all fairness, the NHL is a different animal during the playoffs. Unlike the NBA, there are no easy first round matchups. Columbus is a very dangerous opponent even as a #8 seed with excellent goaltending from Sergei Bobrovsky and good balance between offense and defense. The Jackets were the #12 team offense in the league (3.12 goals per game) and the #11 team defense (2.82 goals against per game). The Columbus power play was bad–#28 in the league–but they’ve already scored three power play goals along with a shorthanded goal in two games against the best special teams in the NHL (#1 in both power play and penalty kill in the regular season). Tampa Bay is facing an opponent that compiled 98 points during the regular season and definitely not an opponent to overlook.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There is a technical case to be made for Tampa Bay albeit a minor one. NHL teams down 0-2 in the first round of the playoffs playing Game 3 in the opponent’s rink win that game 58.8% of the time. Even so, they go on to lose that series just over 70% of the time. All of a sudden, the Jackets are holding every card imaginable. Nothing but respect for Tampa’s Jon Cooper as a head coach but this is his first NHL gig. John Tortorella is a veteran head coach making his tenth trip to the playoffs with three different teams. He’s also got a Stanley Cup win to his credit (ironically enough, with Tampa Bay). There are better X’s and O’s coaches in the NHL but Torts may be the best motivator in hockey. His f-bomb laced Game 1 pep talk to his team has gone viral. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Tampa Bay will be without the NHL’s leading scorer Nikita Kucherov for this crucial Game 3 due to a 1 game suspension for a stupid boarding penalty late in Game 2. The Lightning do have some veterans in the roster that will be expected to step up–former NY Rangers J.T. Miller and Dan Girardi, Ryan Callahan and Steven Stamkos among them. Unfortunately, that might not be enough here. Andrei Vasilevskiy was excellent during the regular season but with Sergei Bobrovsky between the pipes its hard not to give C-Bus the goaltending edge. Now that Seth Jones is living up to the promise that prompted Columbus to acquire him from Nashville the Jackets may have the better defensive corps. Without Kucherov in the lineup, the offensive matchup becomes much more even and Columbus has their fair share of snipers including Matt Duchene and former Chicago Blackhawks’ star Artemi Panarin.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As good as they were during the regular season, the Lightning might have dug themselves a hole they can’t get out of. Maybe everything came too easy for them during the regular season and maybe they’d already assumed that they’d be fighting for the chance to represent the East in the Stanley Cup Finals. They had no trouble with Columbus during the regular season and maybe they just assumed that this dominance (they won all 4 meetings by a combined score of 22-3) would carry over to the playoffs. It’s not hopeless for Tampa Bay–one place they excelled during the regular season was in their ability to bounce back from bad performances. After a loss by 2+ goals the Bolts were 12-1 and they were 11-0 after scoring 1 goal or less. Even so, this is a serious gut check for Tampa Bay and I’m not sure that they’re holding the cards to turn this series around.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
BET COLUMBUS BLUE JACKETS +125 OVER TAMPA BAY LIGHTNING The Tampa Bay Lightning have a problem. A very big problem. They essentially waltzed through the National Hockey League regular…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":5354,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[137],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5353","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-nhl"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.betonline.ag\/news-room\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5353","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.betonline.ag\/news-room\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.betonline.ag\/news-room\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.betonline.ag\/news-room\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.betonline.ag\/news-room\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5353"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.betonline.ag\/news-room\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5353\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5355,"href":"https:\/\/www.betonline.ag\/news-room\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5353\/revisions\/5355"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.betonline.ag\/news-room\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5354"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.betonline.ag\/news-room\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5353"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.betonline.ag\/news-room\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5353"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.betonline.ag\/news-room\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5353"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
BET COLUMBUS\/TAMPA BAY OVER 6 +102 <\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"