For the briefest moment, the past was calling the Lightning.
It was early in Game 2 Thursday night, and the Florida net was wide open. Brayden Point had the puck on his stick and glory in his reach. Bury this backhanded shot from 8 feet away, and it would feel as if a once-indestructible playoff team was back again.
Instead, Point’s shot whizzed a handful of inches wide of the post.
Was it an omen of what was to come? A metaphor for a night of near-misses?
Or just time continuing to remind the Lightning that they are not quite the team they used to be?
“A good pass by (Conor) Geekie there,” Point would say later. “Handled it, tried to put it back in and it just went wide.”
Less than three minutes later, Nate Schmidt hammered a one-timer in from 47 feet away and Tampa Bay’s hopes for redemption seemed to fade into the Tampa night. The Panthers eventually won 2-0 — with an empty-net goal in the final four seconds — to take back-to-back games at Amalie Arena.
And, at this point, there’s no sense in pretending: The Lightning appear cooked.
History says a team that starts 0-2 in a best-of-7 series in the NHL is facing odds somewhere between 5-to-1 and 6-to-1 to advance. When you consider Florida is the defending Stanley Cup champion and the Lightning lost the first two at home, they feel more like a 100-to-1 underdog.
Ah, but you say, they’ve done it before. And not all that long ago.
It’s true that in 2022, the Lightning lost the first two games of the Eastern Conference final at home against the Rangers and then roared back with four consecutive wins. Of course, a week later, they lost the first two to Colorado in the Stanley Cup final and never recovered. And last season, they lost the first two to Florida in the first round and were eliminated in five games.
“It’s tough,” Point said of the missed shot. “It ends up 1-0 and, you know, that could have been the difference. But, at that point in the game, you can’t think like that.”
This is not meant to dump the blame at Point’s feet. The Lightning had plenty of other chances to score Thursday night and failed to capitalize. The website Natural Stat Trick counted nine high-danger chances for Tampa Bay in Game 2 and only two for the Panthers.
Point set Jake Guentzel up with a pass in front of the net during a power play early in the second period, and Guentzel whiffed on the shot. Guentzel returned the favor with a pass to Point late in the second, but his point-blank shot hit Florida goaltender Sergei Bobrovsky in the shoulder.
Overall, the Lightning controlled the action for much of the night without anything to show for it. That includes failing to convert on five power-play opportunities.
The Panthers are an extremely aggressive team and pride themselves on limiting the amount of space that opponents have to work, but this loss had as much to do with Tampa Bay’s offense as it did Florida’s defense.
“I thought we had chances. The looks were there,” Guentzel said. “Sometimes you run into a hot goaltender and (a team that) defends hard. So, for us, it’s just making sure we get pucks in the net and it starts with one game.”
The problem is the Panthers have delivered the first blow in both of the first two games, and the Lightning are not a team known for counter punching.
Yes, the Lightning did okay when going into the first intermission on the wrong side of the scoreboard, but it’s not really their style. This is a team that had the best scoring differential (plus-32) in the league in the first period this season. Chasing a lead does not come naturally.
And yet, they have trailed for 105:07 minutes in the first two games. The other 14:53 they were tied.
In other words, the Lightning have yet to hold a lead.
If you count Game 5 of last year’s first-round loss to the Panthers, the Lightning have now gone three consecutive playoff games without a lead and have been outscored 14-3. That doesn’t feel like a team with an unlikely comeback tucked in its travel bag.
“Unfortunately, you look at the results and say, ‘Hey, it’s not what we wanted.’ ” Lightning coach Jon Cooper said. “But we gave ourselves a chance.”
That’s absolutely true. The Lightning had a chance to take a lead in the first minutes of Game 2. They had a chance to tie the score multiple times in the first and second periods. They just never quite pulled it off.
And now it feels as if the difference between the past and the present remains too wide to navigate.
Tampa Bay drops the first two games of the opening-round series at Amalie Arena and faces a two-game deficit as it heads to Sunrise for the next two games.
