Up until June 7th, 2004 the Lightning had failed to put together back-to-back wins… It had been win-loss-win-loss during the Lightning / Flyers Eastern Conference final and during the Stanley Cup Championship versus the Calgary Flames.

That trend has continued even with a years hiatus of the NHL… The Lightning, coming off a back-to-earth loss to the Ottawa Senators last week at the St. Petersburg Times Forum, put up four unanswered goals in the 3rd period to lay waste to the New Jersey Devils in East Rutherford tonight. Dave Andreychuk decided to remind people he is not retired yet and notched two goals as part of the four-goal 3rd period spark.

Brad Richards notched three assists as the Modin - Richards - St. Louis line generated the Bolts first two goals (the first of which came 34 seconds into the game by Martin St. Louis).

It still wasn’t the dominating performance that one would expect form the bolts and Defense still looked questionable. That’s going to be an issue that will continue to dog the Lightning during the season - the question is how long?

Dear god, what a terrible start to the Sun Sports TV’s broadcast tonight.

It’s well known that Sun Sports is at the mercy of others at times on telecasts in other buildings but for the first five minutes of tonight’s broadcast — things were dismal at best. One could not follow the puck with thanks to distance of the camera on the action, the camera could not follow the action or routinely screwed up doing so. There was no clock on screen and the only way you would know the score was from witnessing Martin St. Louis’ goal on the opening shift first hand.

Fortunately this was resolved after five minutes of play but still - what a horrid start.

Unlike other Tampa Bay coaches, John Tortorella is seeing the undisciplined play of the Lightning and pointing out where the demon (trying to avoid the pun) is:

“To me, after I coach the [Ottawa] game and then I looked at the tape, it was a wake-up call for me on how we are just not detail-oriented right now,” he said. “After watching the tape, it is so evident in all parts of our game. Now we’ve seen it, they’ve talked about it, we’ve looked at it … now we have to solve it. There’s no sense in belly-aching about it now, now we just have to solve the problem.”

Meanwhile, tonight’s opponent, the New Jersey Devils, happen to still be over the Salary Cap from what Mike Chen reports.