Venerable Lightning Defensive Corps Key to Potential Playoff Run
By Dan Herrejon | Thunderstruck Sports
Hall of Fame coach Scotty Bowman once said it takes at least 300 games played for an NHL defenseman to begin to understand their position. If that’s the case, the Tampa Bay Lightning defensive corps is in very capable hands. Five of their top defenders have well over the Bowman requisite 300-game mark.
Victor Hedman, Ryan McDonagh, and John Carlson have 3,408 NHL games played, not counting playoff games. Adding the postseason games, the big three are at almost 4,000 games.
While this experience is nothing to dismiss, the other side of the coin is that those three pairs of legs have a lot of miles on them. It’s the accumulation of almost 48 regular seasons.
Given the choice, come playoff time, most teams would relish this kind of time-tested know-how. But after a regular-season marathon schedule, the possibility of multiple playoff series makes anyone’s legs hurt.
Rolling Out The 11-7
To reduce the strain on the defensive pairings, Coach Jon Cooper has to monitor this issue throughout the regular season. The challenge for the coaching staff is to give the elder statesmen sufficient rest, especially on back-to-back games.
They can also monitor minutes for all because the younger guys in the group aren’t slouches. Cernak and Moser both exceed the Bowman 300, and Emil Lilleberg, Charle-Edouard D’Astous, and Max Crozier can play at the level needed to compete with extra playing time.
We have already seen a handful of games when Cooper has utilized the 11-7 format, playing the extra defenseman. Conventional wisdom dictates that we’ll continue to see this throughout the regular season. Shaving even a few minutes over the 84 regular season games, especially for the veteran three of Hedman, Carlson, and McDonagh, will bode well for a deep playoff run.
The coaching staff and players will do whatever is necessary to change their recent first-round exits in the postseason. Having the freshest possible legs on the defensive corps is a great start, especially with the regular season going an extra couple of games this year.
The bulk of the responsibility falls to the young pups. Lilleberg has shown flashes of more than adequate NHL abilities. At 6’3”, he also has size to play a physical game. The same can be said of Crozier and D’Astous. At 6’3” and 6’2”, respectively, they have the physical size to more than hold their own in today’s NHL.
The test will come this season. Can these young players take on the extra ice time to give the veterans the time they may need?
The Benefits Will Be Seen
The team is off to a fairly decent start, and ice time for the defensemen may be a contributing factor. Nobody is over 20 minutes a game. Only Carlson and Cernak are above 19 minutes, and Moser is a little over 18 minutes a game. Everyone else is under 17 minutes per game.
Expect this kind of ice management to continue throughout the season. Heading into the playoffs, this could be why the team gets through the first round.
While there seems to be a plan for the veterans, an injury can muck up the works. Depending on who is injured and how long they are out, Cooper will likely continue the 11-7 format after a Syracuse call-up.
So, while on paper the age of half the blueliners may seem detrimental, how Cooper and the coaching staff use them will turn that experience into a big advantage.
There is also an offensive benefit to the aforementioned 1-7 format. Cooper can double shift one or two forwards on 2 or 3 different lines.
Most of the extra forward time this season has gone to Nikita Kucherov. Double-shifting Kucherov with the 3rd and 4th lines lets him play with players he doesn’t usually play with, and those grinders tend to up their game when they play with the league's reigning MVP.
It also creates problems for the opposing teams. It’s easy for the coach on the other bench to put his best defenders against the Lightning's top line where Kucherov usually plays. But what does the opposing coach do when Kucherov is double-shifting on the 4th line?
So while other teams may see the defensive corps' advanced age as a disadvantage, Cooper, the reigning coach of the year, uses it to his advantage. Mostly, he spares the older defensive players the usual aches and pains that come with 23-28 minutes of ice time a game.
If the old adage is correct that defense wins championships, the Lightning have a plethora of veteran experience on defense. How deep a playoff run they can go will be determined in part to how fresh those veteran legs will be come playoff time..
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