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The Tampa Bay Lightning are in an 0-1 hole.
On the heels of a 5-3 loss to the New York Islanders in Game 1 of their second-round series, the problems for the Lightning began and ended with the subpar play of
Ben Bishop, a rock for the Bolts all year long, who stopped just nine of 13 shots against in a 29-minute outing on Wednesday.
It’s impossible to genuinely get on Bishop for one game given the way he’s played this season, and especially this postseason (Bishop entered this series with a .950 save percentage), but it’s certainly not unfair to suggest that this series
does come back to how Bishop handles the Islanders.
In a 35-win season that came with a top-five finish in both goals against average (his 2.06 was tops in the league) and save percentage (his .926 was second only to St. Louis Blues goaltender Brian Elliott’s .930, though Bishop played 19 more games), Bishop was stellar against more than a few teams.
The Islanders, however, were not one of those teams. In fact, they were the worst head-to-head for Bishop this year. In three regular-season meetings with the Islanders, Bishop had one win and allowed 12 goals on 76 shots against. An .842 save percentage, Bishop’s worst against Eastern Conference opponent, and second-worst overall (Bishop posted an .836 in his two losses against the Dallas Stars).
But Bishop wasn’t the lone reason the Lightning lost Game 1.
“Our little lapse, the last ten minutes of the first and litle part of the second and especially the last three minutes of the first, killed us,” Lightning head coach
Jon Cooper said. “We can’t sit here every single game and say, ‘Oh well we have Ben Bishop back there, he’s gonna bail us out.’”
Three of the four Islander goals scored on Bishop came from between the circles in their own end, and the breakdowns didn’t just happen there, but started 200 feet the other way, according to Cooper.
And the Isles undoubtedly parked the bus once they grabbed that 4-1 lead, and that allowed the Bolts to crawl their way back into play with goals from Nikita Kucherov and Valtteri Filppula, and ultimately made it a one-goal game before
Cal Clutterbuck scored the empty-net dagger.
But if the Bolts are to even this series by the end of tomorrow’s Game 2 showdown at Amalie Arena, Cooper needs his group -- or, more than Bishop -- to come through with a stronger, consistent effort.
“Sometimes we have to bail [Bishop] out when he’s not at his best, and we didn’t do that,” Cooper noted on Thursday. “And it’s our turn to bail him out because he’s done that way too often for us.”
Ty Anderson has been covering the National Hockey League for HockeyBuzz.com since 2010, has been a member of the Pro Hockey Writers Association's Boston Chapter since 2013, and can be contacted on Twitter, or emailed at Ty.AndersonHB[at]gmail.com.
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