Are the Tampa Bay Lightning middling? Jets game should be telling

After a week away from hockey games — which is weird to experience in the early part of November when you just started getting into the season — the Tampa Bay Lightning finally resume its 2024-2025 schedule Thursday night at home against the Winnipeg Jets.

The 15-1 Jets, of course, look like they’re poised to run away with the Presidents’ Trophy.

The Lightning (7-6-1), on the other hand, looks like a team fumbling to the mediocre middle of professional hockey, a fringe playoff team that disappoints as often as it tantalizes. After a 7-3 start, the Bolts have lost four straight (including one loss in a shootout so surreal the league really should have withheld the obligatory OT participation point).

The Tampa Bay Lightning will face the ultimate test against the Winnipeg Jets

In the process, the Lightning lost their first-line center, Brayden Point, who may or may not be back soon. (No one is saying and don’t you love how the NHL hermetically seals meaningful news from the people who pay for the league’s existence?) The fact the Lightning re-called Gage Goncalves is not a good sign with respect to Point's status.

You want numbers to back up this assessment so let’s deliver some: Tampa Bay is 8th in team scoring (3.50) and 20th in goals allowed (3.14).

Maybe most notable, special teams play, to date, has been, to be generous, unremarkable. After leading the league all of last season in power play percentage, there is no doubt Tampa Bay misses franchise leading scorer Steven Stamkos, a power-play master who was shown the door in the off-season. It’s also clear team management developed no clear strategy to replace Stamkos on the power-play. A revolving door of players has been stationed where Stamkos made his name. Presumably, open tryouts were offered during this hiatus.

Meanwhile, an unheralded aspect of the 2023-2024 team’s run to the playoffs was stellar penalty-kill play, which ranked among the five best in the league. So far this season Tampa Bay is 24th in penalty kill (75 percent). Personnel changes do not explain that sort of drop in effectiveness. If anything, the Lightning should have gotten better with the re-acquisition of defenseman Ryan McDonagh, who is excellent when forced to play a man down.

Given the crucial role the goalie plays on any team — especially the case for the men in Bolt blue — you really can’t make a team assessment without looking at the individual play of Andrei Vasilevskiy. The everyday net-minder is tied for 14th in the league in goals against average (2.59). More alarming, he’s 17th in the league in save percentage. Of course, it takes a team to defend a net, but these numbers are not of the Hall of Fame, take-over-a-game goalie Vasilevskiy has been (and that television broadcasters still paint him as) but rather of a player who may be regressing to a place where he’s an ordinary NHL goalie.

Of course, we must add this additional number to the mix: 14 (games). The Lightning has only played 17 percent of its schedule. There is still time. Not a lot of time, if you buy the American Thanksgiving playoff barometer story that will, no doubt, show up in your feed soon. But it’s early. Sure.

Yet before we look even to the end of this month, the telling thing should be tonight. After a week to recover, repair, and review, we really should see the Lightning play great tonight. Not just good for the first period and hanging on during the second period so as to be close or tied going into the third — the familiar pattern of the last season-plus. Here we don’t even mean that Tampa Bay must win (after all, Winnipeg is really good). What we mean is there should be some pep tonight. There should be some urgency tonight.

It’s hard to say in advance of any one of 82 games that this one matters more than the others but we’re going to anyway. This one matters more than others. If the Lightning can’t put forth a great effort tonight we will be forced to wonder whether middling is just who they are.