Coaching a talented team comes with a bundle of challenges, and one irksome conundrum is how to keep everyone pleased. Skilled players have egos and expectations that need managing and massaging, and coach Jon Cooper often doesn’t get enough credit for how he juggles the Lightning’s roster. (The Lightning have so many good players that it won’t be easy to fit in Ondrej Palat and Anton Stralman when they return from injury.)
With the Lightning trailing 3-1 against the Nashville Predators last Monday, Cooper sensed the offense on the first two lines had gone stale. So he switched Nikita Kucherov with Yanni Gourde. Now Gourde would play with Steven Stamkos and J.T. Miller, and Kucherov with Brayden Point and Tyler Johnson. While the Lightning fell short against the Predators, the Kucherov-Point-Johnson line has been a catalyst for offense, and the Blackhawks and Devils looked helpless to stop it over the holiday weekend.
If opponents want to try to impede the revamped Point line, they need to have their best skating defensemen matched against them. By utilizing the pair of Andy Greene and Damon Severson against the Point line’s high caliber passing and quickness last night, Devils coach John Hynes was waving the white flag before the game even started.
On the set play that led to the Johnson goal after a won faceoff landed on Ryan McDonagh’s stick, McDonagh cast the puck to Kucherov, who had backpedaled toward the perimeter.
Kucherov was the outlet on the breakout, and Point and Johnson ran streaks. Especially in open ice, this is going to produce a mismatch against almost any defensive pair. Against the Devils’ “shutdown” pair it was particularly gruesome.
Kucherov created a foot race against the woefully overmatched Devils defensemen, and the result was a reminder that aging on television can be painful for a professional athlete. Point raced past Greene so quickly that Greene actually lost his balance, and once Point tracked down the area pass, he was able to suck in Severson, who attempted to deny the pass across. Severson failed, leaving Johnson wide open on the weak side. A sensational pass met Johnson in stride for an excellent finish and an extension of the lead to 3-0.
On Friday evening, the Blackhawks made a similar mistake when they deployed the fossilized Duncan Keith to foil the Point line. Unlike in the Devils play, where Kucherov generated a transition opportunity by slinging an area pass to Point that unlocked the scoring chance, Tampa Bay’s second goal against the Blackhawks was generated off the counterattack and punctuated with rapid puck movement. What was so remarkable about the passing wasn’t that it was tape to tape, but rather that the puck was thrown at a target and the recipient was able to move it without missing a beat. Merely by putting the puck in their linemates’ catching radius, the Lightning were able to advance the sequence toward a prime shooting opportunity. (Play starts at 1:40 in video below.)
The Blackhawks’ nightmarish sequence began when Keith tried to wiggle a pass underneath Point in the neutral zone, but an active stick by Point produced a turnover that Kucherov jumped on. From there, the passing seemed like a video game. Kucherov catches Johnson with a dart off the boards. Johnson whips it to Point on the goal line, and Point controls the hard dish at his feet and moves it back to Johnson. The speed of the puck movement forced a mental mistake by Gustav Forsling, who chased Point below assuming that he had coverage that would switch to neutralize Johnson. As the video illustrates, Johnson had clear separation from Keith and Jonathan Toews.
When the puck zigzags through the neutral and offensive zones without so much as a pause or hesitation to allow the defense to read and react, it makes defending incredibly difficult and exhausting. Defenders shift their mode to instinct, which precipitates mental errors like the one committed by Forsling, who pursued a puck-carrier in a non-scoring area and left the middle open. And when Point, Johnson, and Kucherov are able to carry the puck and buy time on the rush, this allows the Lightning defenseman to strike as the trailer or an opposing forward is forced to rejigger his assignment because of an interchange. That is what happened on the goal that pushed the Lightning ahead 3-0 against the Blackhawks. The Lightning’s new top line is scoring in bunches and opponents don’t have time to stop and think.
Tampa Bay Lightning Blogger • 
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