Game 17: Tampa Bay at Carolina
Again with the overtime. Sigh…. The Tampa Bay Lightning lose in a shootout to the Carolina Hurricanes 3-2.
Two days for a new coach obviously doesn’t make a new team game. There wasn’t a lot different going on in this one from the 16 games before it. The entire Lightning squad played desperate for most of the game, but other than that the same mistakes kept being made. Anyone who sees this game as being something new and different from before is simply kidding themselves.
Penalties again were a problem, but they were also a problem for Carolina, too. Hooking seemed to be the call of choice for the officials. Makes me wonder if they’d just gotten a memo or something on that before the game because eight of the 11 penalties called (two for too many men) were hooking calls. You’d think that because the call was hooking that it’d be mostly on defensemen, but it was mostly on the forwards.
Shots were a lot better. Both for and allowed were around 30.
Mike Smith was, again, the best player out there. He had a solid game. And Marty St. Louis also was great, both offensively and defensively. The rest of the team was good, but not particularly outstanding. The good part of that, tho, is that no one was bad.
They’ve got some bad habits going on that are going to take a while for them to get past. Dumping and chasing into the offensive zone (which might be what the coaches want them to do, but I’ve always though was a bad idea unless there was no other option), long passes through the neutral zone, passing the puck in front of their own net, trying to rush through plays, and trying to force things to happen (which makes their passing pretty sloppy). It’s just not very good all the way around.
They need to get to a place where they’re forcing the other team to play their game, but first they need to find their game. Or, maybe, they need to have a game to try to adopt before any of that. Any way you slice it, they need to figure themselves out before they can figure out how to win games.
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