TAMPA, Fla. — The Penguins are coming into Amalie Arena on Thursday night to fight for their playoff lives. With 22 games left in their season, Pittsburgh is clinging to the second wild card in the Eastern Conference, with five teams nipping furiously at their heels to knock them out.
The Lightning are comfortably sitting in the third spot in the Atlantic Division. Perhaps too comfortably. Somehow, Tampa Bay has to find a way to match desperation with urgency, “will and want,” and soon.
“We seem to face this every single year,” Lightning coach Jon Cooper said. “So when teams look at the standings, and that’s the best word possible ... they’re desperate. And clearly we’re not playing with the same desperation our opponents are. It’s a competitive league and the margin of winning and losing is so fine. Desperation and will and want, that’s a big part of it. ...
“It’s not say our guys don’t have that, I want to make that clear. We put ourselves in a pretty good position, but this last week and a half is not what what we’re used to.”
The Penguins embarrassed the Lightning, 7-3, on Sunday in Pittsburgh. The Sabres had more urgency last Thursday in Tampa Bay’s 6-5 overtime loss. And against the Red Wings on Saturday, the Lightning were lucky enough to pull out a win, getting a tremendous performance from goalie Andrei Vasilevskiy.
Tuesday night, the Lightning looked deflated after the Panthers scored three goals in the first period and didn’t match their intensity until the third period.
“We’re getting outplayed by just,” Cooper said. “Whether it’s just small pockets of the game or what have you. The Pittsburgh game we just had a dreadful five minutes or whatever it was, we got outplayed in the Detroit game and I thought much of the Buffalo game until the third period, we were getting outplayed. ...”
“Our formula hasn’t changed, our gameplan hasn’t changed,” Cooper added. “So it’s probably something inside us and we’ve just got to figure that out.”
After the loss to Tuesday night, there was a lot of talk about execution and accountability.
Captain Steven Stamkos and left wing Nick Paul echoed their coach, saying it was a moment in the season when the players needed to look at themselves “in the mirror” and get sorted. The core of this group has been to three straight Stanley Cup finals. They know what they need to do once they get into the playoffs.
But there are still 22 regular-season games remaining on the Lightning’s schedule, and teams will only get hungrier. They have to start countering them with that experience, talent and execution.
“These teams come down the stretch of the season and they are at the point that every play is life or death,” defenseman Ian Cole said. “Every puck out of your zone, and every puck into their zone, every turnover and every icing can be game over. So I think we just need to build that desperation into our game.”
“And I think that it’s hard to manufacture that maybe earlier in the season when you’ve had as much success as this team has had, but we’re getting down to the end of the season now,” Cole added. “... We need to get that mentality going that every play matters.”
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