Lightning offense experiences Dry January

We really wish there was an in-depth explanation as to why the Tampa Bay Lightning struggled to find wins in the month of January. Yes, there were some influences, mostly travel, that affected them, but it really boils down to one thing – they forgot how to score goals.

When you take a deeper look at their underlying numbers, they did a lot of really good things, but unfortunately, the most important part is to put the puck into the net, and that’s what they failed to do for the majority of their busiest month on the calendar.

As you can see in the chart, they produced more scoring and high-danger chances in January than they did in any other month, including the months where they were averaging almost 3.5 goals-per-60-minutes. While they were unlikely to maintain a 12% shooting rate, plummeting to a 5.45% success rate is, quite frankly, astonishing. Over the past few seasons they’ve been one of the top shooting teams in the league, regularly finishing around 9.4% or so.

With roughly the same roster (Jake Guentzel and Steven Stamkos are pretty close at 5v5) we know that the 5.45% is more of an aberration than a trend, so as long as they keep generating those chances, they should be okay. Yes, we’ll put heavy emphasis on “should” because there is a large amount of randomness in hockey and sometimes shots just don’t go into the net.

It’s also relatively impressive that the entire team went through a shooting slump. Usually there are one or two outliers even when the majority isn’t scoring, but the Lightning, well to a man they all saw their shooting percentages drop.

That is seriously impressive in a train-wreck kind of way, especially considering that Lightning forwards tend to shoot from prime scoring chances. The hockey season is full of peaks and valleys, and hopefully the Bolts have bottomed out.

There was a Groundhog Day quality to the month as many of the games seemed to follow the same plot. The Lightning would generate a bunch of chances but not score or score just one goal. Their opponent would score to tie it up or take the lead. Then the Bolts would play a strong third period, but come up short while the opposing netminder looked like Patrick Roy, Henrick Lundqvist, and Ken Dryden all rolled into one (Ten of the fourteen goaltenders they faced over the month posted save percentages above .914 against them in the month).

As for the Lightning, Andrei Vasilevskiy kept them in games as he went 5-5-1 with a strong .929 SV% and 2.00 GAA while posting a 5.57 GSAx. Jonas Johansson put up a slightly more mediocre stat line as he went 2-3-0 with a .874 SV%, 3.06 GAA, and -2.48 GSAx. He is currently sidelined with a lower-body injury and it’s likely that Brandon Halverson may get a shot at the back-up role moving forward.

During his mid-season check-in with the media, Julien BriseBois had this to say about the team’s play.

“The underlying numbers are good because we have good players, and a good team, and they are working hard, and they’re competitive. Where we’ve kind of lacked is finishing and execution. I think fatigue factors into that. We’ve had 15 games this year where we’ve scored fewer than three goals, and I think eight of them have come in our last 15. So maybe that’s a trend that will continue, or maybe, I think it’s the likely scenario, our guys are just tired because we’ve gone through a really grueling stretch of games here. Because these guys all have track records of success before, including this year.”

It wasn’t just the fact that they were traveling or playing a lot of games. Lots of teams have had rougher road trips, but it was the way the schedule was laid out with a bunch of short trips, and the four back-to-backs that really wore them out. If they had a long, two-week road trip, that’s one thing, because a team would usually get a long home-stand to go with it, but the longest homestand they had in January was two games. So, for most of the month, the Lightning were either traveling or playing a game. On more than one occasion, they were doing both, arriving in a city at a late hour, only to play that very same day.

The schedule is what it is, and had they won more games than they lost, it wouldn’t be mentioned quite as much as it has been. However, hockey players are creatures of habit, and when that habit is disrupted, they tend to get out of sorts.

As for other aspects of the game, special teams were down a little on both ends as they finished the month going 26.8% on the power play and killing off 81.8% of their penalties. They were still a top-10 power play team for the month and scoring on a pretty regular schedule until the last three games of the month (they were at 32.4% prior to the games against Detroit, Chicago, and L.A. where they went 0-for-7).

They had a chance to solidify their playoff position in January and stumbled. That makes things a little more difficult moving forward, but they are still in the upper tier of the Eastern Conference and a big part of the playoff picture. The good news is that they’ve already pulled points out of their first two games in February, if they can keep doing that (especially over the next three games), they will keep moving back up in the standings. Honestly, if they get back to scoring like they did earlier in the season, and put a winning streak together, the top of the division isn’t that far out of reach (seven points back of Florida with three games in hand).

That’s the beauty of a league teeming with parity, all it takes is two weeks or three weeks of winning to put a team in a prime position. Based on the first three months of the season, the Lightning have the horses to do it, but they have to start putting the puck in the net to make it happen.