Tampa Bay Lightning Must Address Their Power Play Dilemma – The Hockey Writers – Tampa Bay Lightning

The Tampa Bay Lightning are coming off a 7-6 overtime loss on the road to the Columbus Blue Jackets. While it’s hard to be satisfied with watching an early 3-1 lead slip away, there’s one area they should be happy with. They went 2-for-2 on the power play. It helped them muster a point against a Blue Jackets team, whose offense has been explosive in its last four games (averaging 4.75 goals).

It’s the Lightning on the power play, what’s the big hype here? Well, they just haven’t had that same success with the man advantage as in years past.

Take the 3-2 win over the Pittsburgh Penguins in overtime on Tuesday, for example. While you take the win, it still reflects that they have some work to do. In the game, the Lightning went 0-for-3 with the man advantage. Two of those opportunities came in the first period, which could have helped position them for a win early on in the game – making overtime unnecessary.

If this was a one-off issue, and the power-play performance in the Blue Jackets game was a regular night, then you can pat them on the back for overcoming the off night.

But it’s hard to when the team’s power play has been lackluster all season. Other areas of their game have improved, notably their play at even strength, but it’s been unintentionally at the expense of what was their bread and butter for years.

So let’s look into the issue, and what the repercussions could be.

The Power Play Slump

Just a season ago, the Lightning had the best power play in the entire NHL – scoring with the man advantage 28.6% of the time. They’ve been consistently top 10 in this area since the 2015-16 season. After the Blue Jackets game, they sit at a more respectable 21.4% success rate and are ranked 11th.

However, heading into the game, it was a more anemic 18.5% and 17th in the league.

The Lightning haven’t finished a season in which they scored on fewer than one-fifth of their power play chances since the 2015-16 season (15.8%). So, while the season-long number looks better at the moment, it’s still a significant drop off from the season before and arguably doesn’t reflect the actual performance this season.

So, what could be the cause for this dip? We’ll look at some players currently on the team first before getting to the key guy who no longer is.

Nikita Kucherov is the driving force for this offense. Last season, he was involved in half of the team’s scoring on the season,…