Brayden Point

Tampa Bay Lightning Are Falling Back Into Old Habits

Updated Mar. 4, 2020 3:30 p.m. ET

Fansided, Tasha St. Pierre/FanSided via Bolts by the Bay

The Tampa Bay Lightning have been playing much better as of late, but over the last couple of games, the team has seemingly fallen back into some unnerving old habits.

The 2016-17 season has been an interesting time to be a Tampa Bay Lightning fan. After starting off the season with a bang, the Lightning seemed to slip into a deep downward spiral. Of course, a lot of this can be attributed to the insane amount of injuries the Lightning have been forced to deal with as of late.

On the bright side, the Tampa Bay Lightning have worked together to find a way to win amongst all the chaos. The Lightning kicked off their five-game road trip on a high note by taking three of the available four points in their back-to-back series.

Unfortunately, there is a little bit of bad news to sully the sunshine. There were two aspects of the game that led to the Lightning’s unfortunate overtime loss to the Toronto Maple Leafs. The first of those is the penalties; however, that is another story for another day.

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The one thing that resounded the most over the course of the Tampa Bay Lightning’s battle with the Toronto Maple Leafs was how quickly the team seemed to be falling face first into one of their most annoying bad habits…overpassing the puck.

The Tampa Bay Lightning had 13 turnovers in Friday night’s game against the Maple Leafs. This is the highest amount of turnovers the Lightning have had during the entire month of December. The unfortunate part is, a large number of those turnovers were due to the team overpassing the puck.

If you were one of the many Lightning fans inside the Amalie Arena, you could hear many fans screaming “Shoot!” or “Shoot the puck!” Of course, you probably heard a lot of other things that are far less proper to print.

There was another person who was rather dissatisfied with the Lightning’s propensity to overpass the puck. Said person would be Lightning founder Phil Esposito. Espo’s sarcasm rang through on the radio broadcast where he could be heard saying “At least he shot the puck.”

The Tampa Bay Lightning has plenty of talented forwards capable of putting the puck in the back of the net. Take for example Lightning forward Nikita Kucherov. Kucherov has played in 30 games this season with the Bolts. In that amount of time, he’s continued to lead the team in almost all manners scoring with 13 goals and 20 assists for a total of 33 points.

Right behind Nikita Kucherov is defenseman Victor Hedman. Hedman, arguably the Lightning’s strongest two-way defenseman, has brought home seven goals and 24 assists for a total of 31 points.

The amount of talent on this team is almost unimaginable. Unfortunately, the injuries have continued to wear down on the team by negatively impacting the team’s chemistry.

If the Lightning could simply stick to their system, be aggressive with the puck, capitalize on the opportunities presented to them, and manage to keep themselves out of the penalty box, they could easily be one of the top teams in the National Hockey League.

The Tampa Bay Lightning have just one day to themselves before it’s back to business. The Tampa Bay Lightning will ring in the New Year in style as they take on the Carolina Hurricanes at the Amalie Arena here in the heart of the Bolts Nation.

The action is set to kick off at 7:00 p.m. It will be interesting to see how the team responds after their disappointing 3-2 overtime loss to the Toronto Maple Leafs.

If fans are lucky, they’ll be able to kick off the New Year with the team that beat the Detroit Red Wings and St. Louis Blues and not the team that fell 4-0 to the Washington Capitals. Only time will tell what the future holds for the Bolts and their fans as 2016 comes to a close.