Well, the Richmeister notched his 400th career point tonight and Vinny Lecavalier notched #450 of his career. You can label both those as accomplishments for the night…

But watching this game and watching the Lightning’s streak of victories against the Flyers come to a close, I couldn’t do much more than recall Tiny’s comment he posted last night:

BTW, you left defense off the list on your recent poll. One Boyle does not a defense make.

That was the great equalizer… Versus the last place team in the NHL, the Lightning defense allowed four goals… Poor line changes, poor coverage, lack of grit… If you want to know what’s wrong with this team (while Vinny, Marty and others are contributing enough offense), look no further than the Lightning defense.

For a long while I’ve been laying off the Lightning in various ways — haven’t been overly critical of what’s (not) been accomplished on ice, or how the team has been put together, etc. I know I pissed some people off last season with my rants against John Grahame and the goalie situation (but it was justified in the end — he had his fans, but he didn’t have his consistency).

But there’s been one thing that’s been haunting me all season — and that’s the team’s decline and blame. Blame for poor performance, blame for the cap situation, blame for lack of foresight, etc.

First things first — I think we can all say the Lightning are not performing as well as they should be. Yes, Marty is back. Vincent Lecavalier is scoring and contributing… Paul Ranger, Eric Perrin and Ryan Craig have fire’s within them that drive them on ice. Nikita Alexeev is contributing unlike he ever did before at the NHL level…

But there is only so much you can laud in player performance before you see the teams record and them sitting in a sub-.500 position in the Southeast. The Lightning should be better than this, why aren’t they? (more…)