This was a scheduled NHL loss where the schedule monkey makes a team travel and play a back-to-back against a team that has been resting for a few days. But you have to give Tampa credit. Manytimes in the parity-filled NHL, when a team gets a similar game or even just a game against a weak or struggling team, they take things for granted and pay the price. Tampa aggressively took what was there for the taking.

No one who watched the game probably remembers it now, but the Canes actually skated a decent 1st period. They survived a handful of turnovers and did a decent job stopping Tampa's flow up the ice. The only goal allowed was actually on a fairly harmless 1-on-1 rush and a shot from outside the defenseman. But this game was eerily reminiscent of the Islanders game (also a road back-to-back against a rested team) where the Canes skated decent out of the gate but appeared to have the guys divided equally among 1, 2, or 3 second random time delays from the cement legs. The result was the same difficulty connecting any dots on passes. I said in my post after the Atlanta game that these difficult schedule games often take some kind of magic to pull out a win. Up until the 2nd Tampa goal the Canes were in the game, putting forth the effort, struggling to survive and desperately waiting for the magic they needed to pull out a win.

But the magic never showed up.

1) Goaltending. Oftentimes a win in this game is the 'stolen by the goalie' variety. Let's be very clear that Ward was not the problem tonight, but he was not the magic either. He had no chance on the flukey 2nd goal, and the other 3 were all good shots by top-tier NHL finishing scorers, but they did beat him on all 3 occasions and twice to the short side.

2) A lucky break or 2. A lucky goal or 2 goes a long way toward eeking out a win or at least an overtime point in a game like this. Instead, it was the Lightning that got a weird carom of the end board right to St. Louis' stick 5 feet from the net and a 2-0 lead. Lucky breaks were nowhere to be found for Carolina.

3) A big night on the powerplay. If you can fight your way to close to even 5-on-5, the powerplay that is not so much a skating game can be the magic needed. Again, nobody home tonight for the Canes whose powerplay did look a little better late but was not there when it could have helped.

Was there anything at all worth keeping from tonight? A couple small things. Aside from taking an unnecessary frustration slashing penalty late, Erik Cole skated well tonight and seemed to have a jump in his step that no one else had. Chad Larose played a decent game and seems to be reestablishing the gritty role he played well for the Canes last year. He has increasingly found his way to decent scoring chances in his past few games. If he can find a little finish it would be a big bonus.

A few comments on Tampa:

1) Again, give them credit for taking a game the schedule says they should win. They took nothing for granted and worked hard to make these 2 points much easier than they had to be.

2) Big 3 waking up. After a slow start they have had a couple big games. With dollar-driven departures of big pieces of the Cup team (Modin, Stillman, Kubina, Khabibulin) and only modest progress replacing them with young talent, Tampa is arguably more reliant on a couple scorers than any other team in the league. Tell me how Marty, Vinnie and Brad did on any given night and I will tell you how the Lightning fared.

3) Getting back to their skating game. Tonight's game looked like an 03-04 Lightning game where they used their skating to completely bottle things up defensively and opportunistically create scoring chances at the same time. I think playing this brand of defense that leads to offense hockey is vital to the success of this team, as it gives them a chance to collect points in 2-2 kind of games when the big 3 do not come up big.

This game puts Carolina back at square 1 in terms of building any kind of momentum and getting in some kind of groove where points come easily. To their credit they have gutted out some points here and there to hang around the .500 mark waiting to catch some magic that is due to arrive soon.

Go Canes!

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