With last nights 4-3 loss to the Toronto Maple Leafs, the Bolts dropped 6 points out of the 8th playoff spot with only 16 games to play.  Barring a 6 to 7 game streak of some sort, the Bolts look like they’ll be missing the playoffs again.
“We play hard, but hard’s not good enough right now,” Lightning forward Martin St. Louis said. “For us it’s about results right now and we just can’t seem to find that.”
The Bolts took an early first period lead on “The Shot”, Steven Stamkos’s 42nd goal from his patented spot.  Not sure why teams continue [...]

I’m sure everyone already knew this fact, but Barry Melrose is a moron.  It’s not just his douchey hair, or his douchebag suits, it’s his idiotic comments that truly make him a real moron.  As THN.com said in an article about Steven Stamkos this morning:
Former Lightning coach Barry Melrose will probably never live down his assessment of Stamkos as a rookie last season. After he was fired by the Bolts and replaced by Rick Tocchet, Melrose questioned whether Stamkos was ready for the NHL and to handle the physical play against the league’s big defencemen.
Stammers now has 41 goals, 3 [...]

The Bolts lost last night 5-4 to the Washington Capitals at the Verizon Center.  With the loss the Bolts move 3 points out of the 8th playoff spot, with 19 games remaining.
The game was very chippy, due to the last meeting between the two teams at the St Pete Times Forum, but surprisingly didn’t feature any fighting majors.
In the first period, Eric Fehr for the Caps and Steve Downie both scored their 16th goals of the season.  Downie extended his point streak to 9 games, second only to Steven Stamkos on the team.  It looked like the game was going [...]

After trading Jeff Halpern yesterday, I took a look at the NHL stats for Teddy Purcell, and they seemed to be quite modest at best. After reading a few more articles and pieces on Purcell, it became clear that he had way more upside then his limited stat total in LA seemed to indicate.  THN.com loved the move for the Bolts.  Hockeysfuture gives him a prospect grade of a 7 which they define as: Second line forward / No. 3-4 defenseman / journeyman No. 1 goaltender — players not quite good enough to play on the top line or pairing [...]

I was talking with a good friend before yesterdays goal medal tilt with the Canadiens, trying to summarize my level of excitement for the game.  My friend, said he hadn’t been this excited for a hockey game since the Bolts were in the Stanley Cup Finals.  I personally felt that even then, I didn’t have as much anxiety, and giddiness leading up to the game.  I can only remember one time in my life having a real nervous stomach before a sporting event that I didn’t personally play in, and that was the Bucs Super Bowl vs the Raiders.  I [...]

With a 6-1 walloping of the Fin’s yesterday in semifinal play, the US moves to the gold medal round on Sunday @ 3pm EST.
This was a completely one sided affair almost from the start.  The US looked hungry, and the Fins made some early mistakes coupled with some awful goaltending and the game was a wrap at that point.
Early in the game, Ryan Malone, cleared a puck out of the defensive zone down the ice.  Due to the hustle of Phil Kessell, Finnish goalie Miika Kiprusoff was forced to come out and play the puck, and instead of passing it [...]

There have been a few monikers already labeled on most of the days of hockey thusfar in the Olympics, Super Sunday, Wonderful Wednesday, etc.  I’m not sure what to exactly call yesterday, but I must say that I was pretty excited to sit down and watch 4 hockey games between the top 8 teams in the World, and I was not let down.
US 2 Swiss 0
The US were clearly the better team in a game that they just had trouble had scoring in.   Jonas Hiller for the Swiss was phenomenal, stopping 42 of 43 shots.  The Americans looked like [...]

I had never been more excited for a Winter Olympics than this year.  It wasn’t for the chance to win the overall medal count, or to see Bode Miller or Shaun White wreak havoc, it was for one thing, and one thing only, the United States Olympic Hockey Team.  I thought Brian Burke did a fantastic job of putting together an American team with heart, grit, size and enough talented playmakers to make up for the fact that we don’t have as many elite level All Stars as the Canadiens or even the Russians for that matter.
The lines for the [...]