GDT: 12/19/24 - 7:00PM EDT - St. Louis vs Tampa Bay

[Stammertime91]

That was pretty bad. How do you miss the empty net that many times?

It's Cooper. Can Coop. He's legitimately ruining this teams ENG production by not leaving Kucherov out there the whole time. He put Point, Paul and Guentzel out there? Please. Any ball busting coach would leave Kucherov out there. Cooper also yelled from the bench "no Jake!" To sabotage his decision making. He wins another game because the Blues were too cowardice to play tough. It's sickening.

 

[Soul Assumption]

It's Cooper. Can Coop. He's legitimately ruining this teams ENG production by not leaving Kucherov out there the whole time.

This, but unironically. Kuch shouldn't be on the bench when the net is empty.

 

[Pierre Larouche]

The shell was initially the way CBJ swept us (and to a lesser extent, the way Washington beat us). We couldn't beat em, so we joined em. And we took the most talented team in the league and played a style that was normally used to win cups for less talented teams. And we bulldozed our way to two cups.

I think sometimes we use regular season games like practice for the playoffs. We definitely did that in 2020. We were not a good team as we transitioned to this style of play. But we figured it out. Most teams have learned that the way to win in the playoffs is, on defense, just give up the perimeter and murder anyone who tries to get inside.

Great comment- I miss the "Flying Lightning" though.

 

[Hockeyville USA]

Nice win, Vasilevskiy was good. Nice to see Goncalves get his first!

 

[These Are The Days]

Same as every other team that scores a lot. They get their big wins too.

Trying to get Cooper away from a system that won two cups... good luck.

Run any system you want as long as you have the players who can execute. I just want it to work. St. Louis is horrible offensively so it's not a problem on a night like last night. But doing this for 2 periods against the Leafs (who basically showed the whole world how to crack us open) and watching it inevitably fail over and over again and we lose doesn't make it okay because it worked 5 years ago.

 

[Rschmitz]

Run any system you want as long as you have the players who can execute. I just want it to work. St. Louis is horrible offensively so it's not a problem on a night like last night. But doing this for 2 periods against the Leafs (who basically showed the whole world how to crack us open) and watching it inevitably fail over and over again and we lose doesn't make it okay because it worked 5 years ago.

If history began in 2022 against the Leafs, without the perspective of a decade of watching other postseason collapses, I would agree that it's a problem that needs addressed.

However, we've had a lot of really good offensive teams that couldn't beat tight checking defensive oriented teams. In 2018 we led the league in goals by quite a bit, but we lost the ECF against the Caps by getting shutout in consecutive games. We were offensive juggernauts in 2019, but couldn't manage much of anything against Columbus. 325 goals scored, 100+ goal differential, and we got swept.

We had no idea how to score when the open ice evaporated, and it showed. Cooper was on the verge of being the next Tony Dungy here in Tampa and getting canned. The #FireCooper movement began then.

Yeah, we've collapsed against Toronto, in large part due to Vasy being a liability, but that was an exception. High scoring teams like Boston, Carolina, Florida, the Rangers, couldn't do shit against us. We did to them what Washington under Boudreau and Columbus under Torts did to us.

 

[DFC]

If history began in 2022 against the Leafs, without the perspective of a decade of watching other postseason collapses, I would agree that it's a problem that needs addressed.

However, we've had a lot of really good offensive teams that couldn't beat tight checking defensive oriented teams. In 2018 we led the league in goals by quite a bit, but we lost the ECF against the Caps by getting shutout in consecutive games. We were offensive juggernauts in 2019, but couldn't manage much of anything against Columbus. 325 goals scored, 100+ goal differential, and we got swept.

We had no idea how to score when the open ice evaporated, and it showed. Cooper was on the verge of being the next Tony Dungy here in Tampa and getting canned. The #FireCooper movement began then.

Yeah, we've collapsed against Toronto, in large part due to Vasy being a liability, but that was an exception. High scoring teams like Boston, Carolina, Florida, the Rangers, couldn't do shit against us. We did to them what Washington under Boudreau and Columbus under Torts did to us.

Right. We won cups by taking the most talented offensive team in the league and teaching them to play shut down hockey. The gamble is that we will capitalize in our chances more than the other team. Possession was all the rage until around that time, because some ahead-of-the-curve coaches were weaponizing their opponents' prioritizing possession over all else.

Look no further than the Leafs for the best example of how affective systems like this are in the playoffs. The Leafs happily turn into a perimeter team every April. And they have all this offensive power who suddenly can't score. What a mystery.

 

[These Are The Days]

We have scored at least 3 goals in 24/30 games and lead all teams in 1st period goal differential, but I get it. The shell is definitely a thing, and not entertaining.

In 2019 we blew the doors off of every team we faced. That team was entertaining, but forgot how to play when the puck wasn’t on their sticks. Our GA was kept down due to puck control and shot suppression, but once open ice disappeared in the postseason we had no idea how to play without the puck.

Based on player interviews, I feel like it’s clear that the shell is a deliberate attempt to make sure that doesn’t happen again.

It was the right thing to do. But my beef is that the system Cooper runs lives and dies on every possible break going our way. Every team in the league knows what we are going to do before we even do it. A lot of our success was due to it being new and teams not having a playbook. These days a bad offense like St. Louis is going to roll over and die. A team like Florida and Toronto on the other hand is gonna blast us with 25 shots and probably score 3 times in 34 minutes. When we won our titles we'd hang on for 15 minutes or so. These days we are freely giving the highest scoring teams in the league an open book test for half the game. No one is making the Lightning spend half the game without the puck now and the fact we choose to do this night after night is stupid.

If history began in 2022 against the Leafs, without the perspective of a decade of watching other postseason collapses, I would agree that it's a problem that needs addressed.

However, we've had a lot of really good offensive teams that couldn't beat tight checking defensive oriented teams. In 2018 we led the league in goals by quite a bit, but we lost the ECF against the Caps by getting shutout in consecutive games. We were offensive juggernauts in 2019, but couldn't manage much of anything against Columbus. 325 goals scored, 100+ goal differential, and we got swept.

We had no idea how to score when the open ice evaporated, and it showed. Cooper was on the verge of being the next Tony Dungy here in Tampa and getting canned. The #FireCooper movement began then.

Yeah, we've collapsed against Toronto, in large part due to Vasy being a liability, but that was an exception. High scoring teams like Boston, Carolina, Florida, the Rangers, couldn't do shit against us. We did to them what Washington under Boudreau and Columbus under Torts did to us.

We weren't defending 30 minutes a night in our Cup runs. 15 at most

 

[DFC]

Run any system you want as long as you have the players who can execute. I just want it to work. St. Louis is horrible offensively so it's not a problem on a night like last night. But doing this for 2 periods against the Leafs (who basically showed the whole world how to crack us open) and watching it inevitably fail over and over again and we lose doesn't make it okay because it worked 5 years ago.

Have you not seen this exact system, in one form or another, beat the Leafs out every year for a decade? That's a weird example to use. The Leafs can't win in the playoffs literally because they have refused to play this style.

What was it Keefe said on the way out? The Bruins gave the Leafs the opportunity to beat themselves and they took it? They just allowed the Leafs to possess the puck and turned them into a perimeter team.

It was the right thing to do. But my beef is that the system Cooper runs lives and dies on every possible break going our way. Every team in the league knows what we are going to do before we even do it. A lot of our success was due to it being new and teams not having a playbook. These days a bad offense like St. Louis is going to roll over and die. A team like Florida and Toronto on the other hand is gonna blast us with 25 shots and probably score 3 times in 34 minutes. When we won our titles we'd hang on for 15 minutes or so. These days we are freely giving the highest scoring teams in the league an open book test for half the game. No one is making the Lightning spend half the game without the puck now and the fact we choose to do this night after night is stupid.


We weren't defending 30 minutes a night in our Cup runs. 15 at most

We defended for 3 and 4 minutes at a time sometimes. We sat on leads for 50 minutes at a time. I have no idea what you are remembering.

 

[These Are The Days]

Have you not seen this exact system, in one form or another, beat the Leafs out every year for a decade? That's a weird example to use. The Leafs can't win in the playoffs literally because they have refused to play this style.

What was it Keefe said on the way put? The Bruins gave the Leafs the opportunity to beat themselves and they took it? They just allowed the Leafs to possess the puck and turned them into a perimeter team.

My issue isn’t the system. My issue is we strayed away from what made us successful. When the system DID work we were all breathing into paper bags trying not to stroke out for 15 minutes. Using it more and longer has gotten us nowhere and effectively fixed what wasn't broken. We went from winning a period on defense to not being able to see Lightning players on the TV screen 3 minutes into the 2nd period because they're all backed up to the red line thanks to that 2 goal lead we got. In 2020 and 2021 we continued the pressure until the 3rd period at least

 

[DFC]

My issue isn’t the system. My issue is we strayed away from what made us successful. When the system DID work we were all breathing into paper bags trying not to stroke out for 15 minutes. Using it more and longer has gotten us nowhere and effectively fixed what wasn't broken. We went from winning a period on defense to not being able to see Lightning players on the TV screen 3 minutes into the 2nd period because they're all backed up to the red line thanks to that 2 goal lead we got

It was really, really a lot longer than 15 minutes. As soon as we scored a goal we spent the rest of the game killing the clock.

 

[OffBy1]

Great to see Gonzo get his first, and it was a pretty one - too bad he blacked out on it.

I also loved seeing Lilleberg take care of himself against a more established vet who seemed to be taking him lightly. I hope Lilleberg works on his fighting skills, looks like he's going to need them. He shows some offensive ability, if he can continue to improve defensively maybe he's got second pair ceiling in him.

The Blues seemed to have the memo on Vasy letting in occasional softies from the point - glad to see he was solid tonight. A good game considering we're down Moser. This is probably Raddysh's best chance for minutes this season, he better make the most of it.

 

[Rschmitz]

It was the right thing to do. But my beef is that the system Cooper runs lives and dies on every possible break going our way. Every team in the league knows what we are going to do before we even do it. A lot of our success was due to it being new and teams not having a playbook. These days a bad offense like St. Louis is going to roll over and die. A team like Florida and Toronto on the other hand is gonna blast us with 25 shots and probably score 3 times in 34 minutes. When we won our titles we'd hang on for 15 minutes or so. These days we are freely giving the highest scoring teams in the league an open book test for half the game. No one is making the Lightning spend half the game without the puck now and the fact we choose to do this night after night is stupid.


We weren't defending 30 minutes a night in our Cup runs. 15 at most

I think this is too much of a simplification. Last night our defense definitely stopped joining the rush after that second goal, and our forecheck went way down, but I don't think we were selling out to play D either. Many, many times instead of making the simple play up the wall, we were still looking for breakouts and counter attacks. Their loan goal was because we got sloppy with exiting the zone.

 

[These Are The Days]

It was really, really a lot longer than 15 minutes. As soon as we scored a goal we spent the rest of the game killing the clock.

Against bad offenses like Montreal and NYI sure. But we approached teams differently. We didn't win the Stanley Cup punting for 40 minutes against Dallas. We'd shut down the 3rd and it worked. It's stupid to think we're gonna do 40 minutes against a team like Toronto or Florida with our 4th line being as old and slow as it is. Shut down the 3rd instead of 2/3 of the game and we are probably good




Edit: TL;DR: we could shut down a great offense for 20 minutes. That is about all you can ask of anyone. Bad offenses we could do for longer. But these days we just try 40 minutes no matter who it is and I dislike how frequently it doesn't work

 

[Soul Assumption]

We could afford to play that system because we had a deep roster with a lot of defensive players. Gourde's line sometimes had more ice time than Kucherov and Point, because Kuch and Point scored, and then Gourde held the lead. But now we can't afford to play in our zone without the puck so much, because you know Hedman will eventually fail to clear the zone and the good team will score and you will lose.

 

[DrMartinVanNostrand]

We'd shut down the 3rd and it worked

Except that's also not really what happened in that series? Dallas scored in the 3rd period in five of the six games. They outscored us 5-2 in that period. We twice gave up tying goals with less than 10 minutes to play (including in Game 5 when the Cup could've been won that night). 2021 is probably a better example of a postseason where the clamps would truly get put down on 3rd period leads - a quick memory scan tells me we didn't lose a 3rd period lead in any of the last three rounds of that postseason, we blew two of them vs. Florida but recovered to win one of them - but 2020 saw leads against the Bruins and Stars slip, but back then OT shined in our favor in a way that OT has stopped doing so since 2022.

 

[These Are The Days]

Except that's also not really what happened in that series? Dallas scored in the 3rd period in five of the six games. They outscored us 5-2 in that period. We twice gave up tying goals with less than 10 minutes to play (including in Game 5 when the Cup could've been won that night). 2021 is probably a better example of a postseason where the clamps would truly get put down on 3rd period leads - a quick memory scan tells me we didn't lose a 3rd period lead in any of the last three rounds of that postseason, we blew two of them vs. Florida but recovered to win one of them - but 2020 saw leads against the Bruins and Stars slip, but back then OT shined in our favor in a way that OT has stopped doing so since 2022.

That's kind of how I meant it. We didn't sit on leads for 40 minutes vs Dallas. Other teams like Montreal that didn't have good offenses? Yeah we could get away with it. I have no problem with how we play. I just don't like the idea of hanging back for 2 periods when we won titles doing it for 20 minutes at most against an offense like Dallas.

More recently, we got extremely lucky beating the Leafs being as conservative as we were and I don't expect us to always be able to ride it

 

[Sky04]

Have you not seen this exact system, in one form or another, beat the Leafs out every year for a decade? That's a weird example to use. The Leafs can't win in the playoffs literally because they have refused to play this style.

What was it Keefe said on the way out? The Bruins gave the Leafs the opportunity to beat themselves and they took it? They just allowed the Leafs to possess the puck and turned them into a perimeter team.



We defended for 3 and 4 minutes at a time sometimes. We sat on leads for 50 minutes at a time. I have no idea what you are remembering.

I mean the Panthers and the Oilers play a ton of run and gun hockey and both were in the finals last year, there's no one way blue print to win a cup. It's pretty much what he said, you can play any system as long as there's complete buy-in. The Leafs are an outlier not a norm at this point, there's literally been no other team in the history of the league to have failed as bad as they have with the talent level, the Leaf's failure isn't because they won't play defense it's cause they're charming soft offensively as well, they don't forecheck heavily like other good offensive teams do, yeah they're dangerous on the rush but they don't create chaos like the Panthers or 16'/17' Penguins did that's why they get passive in tight games.

And I don't think they Lightning played complete shut down hockey when they won, they just legit had the deepest roster in the league which means every line to line matchup is going in our favor. We had a 3rd line that could go against teams 1st and 2nd lines and a ton of players playing down a spot which helped the depth out insanely. Not having to trade Johnson and Killorn in 2021 was absolutely instrumental, Johnson was a 0.5PPG player on our 4th line that run.

 

[Rschmitz]

I mean the Panthers and the Oilers play a ton of run and gun hockey and both were in the finals last year, there's no one way blue print to win a cup. It's pretty much what he said, you can play any system as long as there's complete buy-in. The Leafs are an outlier not a norm at this point, there's literally been no other team in the history of the league to have failed as bad as they have with the talent level, the Leaf's failure isn't because they won't play defense it's cause they're charming soft offensively as well, they don't forecheck heavily like other good offensive teams do, yeah they're dangerous on the rush but they don't create chaos like the Panthers or 16'/17' Penguins did that's why they get passive in tight games.

And I don't think they Lightning played complete shut down hockey when they won, they just legit had the deepest roster in the league which means every line to line matchup is going in our favor. We had a 3rd line that could go against teams 1st and 2nd lines and a ton of players playing down a spot which helped the depth out insanely. Not having to trade Johnson and Killorn in 2021 was absolutely instrumental, Johnson was a 0.5PPG player on our 4th line that run.

In 2022 the Panthers scored 340 goals and won the Presidents trophy, then they faced us and scored 3 goals in 4 games and got swept out like trash.

Last year, they were 2nd in GA. Two Selke caliber forwards, a +56 defenseman, a Vezina finalist, etc.
They didn't just run and gun their way to the Cup, they played defense.

 

[DFC]

I mean the Panthers and the Oilers play a ton of run and gun hockey and both were in the finals last year, there's no one way blue print to win a cup. It's pretty much what he said, you can play any system as long as there's complete buy-in. The Leafs are an outlier not a norm at this point, there's literally been no other team in the history of the league to have failed as bad as they have with the talent level, the Leaf's failure isn't because they won't play defense it's cause they're charming soft offensively as well, they don't forecheck heavily like other good offensive teams do, yeah they're dangerous on the rush but they don't create chaos like the Panthers or 16'/17' Penguins did that's why they get passive in tight games.

And I don't think they Lightning played complete shut down hockey when they won, they just legit had the deepest roster in the league which means every line to line matchup is going in our favor. We had a 3rd line that could go against teams 1st and 2nd lines and a ton of players playing down a spot which helped the depth out insanely. Not having to trade Johnson and Killorn in 2021 was absolutely instrumental, Johnson was a 0.5PPG player on our 4th line that run.

The Panthers shut down everyone. Kucherov got shut down and he was probably the most successful star forward until they ran into McDavid.