While the Lightning were fairly balanced in their forms of attack on the season generating some of their offense off of a forecheck/cycle game and some off of the rush, the Panthers rely a lot more on their forecheck to get things going. This would be an interesting chart to see if Duclair has made any sort of impact since he likes to generate his offense from in front of the net as we can see in this graphic: Kucherov doesn’t shoot from) is at league average or below. Compare that to the Lightning, who have their definite focus spots:Įverywhere else (which conveniently coincides with areas Mr. The rest of the players on the ice are there to get the puck towards the net and let those two much around for deflections and rebounds hence the reason they shooting above league average from just about everywhere on the ice. That’s not a bad plan when you have a player like Matthew Tkachuk (right side) and Sam Reinhart (left side) hanging out beside the goaltender’s crease. McCurdy’s lovely visual is based on the entire season, but chances the sample size we’ve been looking at for most of the numbers don’t deviate much from what we’re seeing, which is a lot of offense from the half-boards and the sides of the net. As their season chart shows, they like to shoot from just about everywhere except right in front of the net. Since February 1st they were 8th in the league in shot attempts at 64 per 60 minutes and 8th in shots on goal at 30.98/60. They can withstand their rather paltry shooting percentage by making up for it in volume. Meanwhile, the Panthers are a bit more of a volume team. Those two led to 20 of the Lightning’s 69 5v5 goals over that time frame at a rate that is probably not sustainable, even in a seven-game series. Granted he did that in only 17 games, so it’s still impressive. Anthony Duclair had an even higher percentage at 28.57%, but on half as many shots (28). The 10.21% was brought to you primarily by Brayden Point, who, on 60 shots on net, found the back of it an astonishing 20% of the time.

The Lightning probably shouldn’t have scored as many goals as they did at 5v5, but when you have a team that can shoot the puck as well as they do, well, you can outscore the metrics a bit. All stats are at a per-60 rate with the league ranking in parentheses. So, the below 5v5 stats will be from February 1st, which gives us a 33-game sample from the Panthers and a 32-game sample from the Lightning. It should give us a fairly decent look at where these teams finished since it blends some “games that matter” in with how they finished down the stretch. So there has to be a happy medium, right? Probably not, but for the sake of argument, we picked the somewhat random date of February 1st to measure some stats. After all, the Lightning team we saw in March was a far cry from the one we saw in November. For some reason a full season seems a bit too much as well. While it’s always fun to see how teams did head-to-head, a three-game sample is really too small. Still, it’s the Lightning and the Panthers, things are going to deteriorate at some point between these two, so special teams will play a factor. Is it a coincidence that the game with the least amount of 5v5 time is the one that the Lightning won? Probably, especially since Andrei Vasilevskiy was really, really good that night. They played the Panthers pretty evenly for the most part. If you throw out the 9-2 game, the numbers aren’t all of that depressing for the Lightning. The third match went more according to plan as Andrei Vasilevskiy stopped 47 of 50 shots in a 5-3 victory.

In their second meeting, who knows what the hell happened as Florida trounced the Lightning 9-2. In their first get together, the Lightning were sluggish out of the gate and unable to battle back in a 3-2 loss. So let’s take a look at some of the 5v5 stats for both the Tampa Bay Lightning and Florida Panthers to see if there is anything we can possibly find out about the two teams.ĭuring the regular season, the teams met three times with the Panthers prevailing twice. Pretty much everything that happened before a playoff series is meaningless, but we have to pay the light bill around here, and honestly, for as much as things can change in a seven-game series, there are still some overarching strengths and weaknesses teams bring into their match-up. The great thing about writing playoff previews is that, once the puck is dropped, they are meaningless.

Rush team unblocked games