Tampa Bay Lightning and St. Louis Blues Stick Out as Jekyll-and-Hyde NHL Teams

Parity is somewhat of a mixed blessing in the NHL. It gives hope to some of the league’s have-not teams, but it also tempers the hope of the league’s have-teams.

And this season, there’s no shortage of mediocrity on display, with two teams standing out as Jeykll-and-Hyde in their respective conferences. 

Those teams are the St. Louis Blues in the Western Conference and the Tampa Bay Lightning in the Eastern Conference. As you’ll see below, the Blues and Lightning share some similarities, but they’ve gone about their business in drastically different ways this season.

The Lightning are a thoroughly mediocre 10-10-5 this year, and they’re currently in the midst of a four-game losing streak in which they’ve been outscored 19-5, including an 8-1 drubbing at the hands of the Dallas Stars Saturday. 

Other than a modest three-game win streak beginning in mid-November, the Bolts have been unable to win more than two games in a row since the season began. Tampa is a top-10 team in the league on offense, with an average goals-for total of 3.32 – however, it’s been another story altogether when it comes to their defense, which is ranked 30th overall at a bloated 3.72 goals-against average per game.

Tampa’s problems in their own zone can’t be blamed solely on their goaltending, although their goaltending has hardly been great. Indeed, since veteran superstar netminder Andrei Vasilevskiy returned to action on Nov. 24, his record has been 1-3-0, and his individual stats include a dismal 3.87 goals-against average and .859 save percentage. 

Vasilevskiy isn’t getting much support from the Lightning’s whittled-down defense corps – whose top six blueliners are a combined minus-42 thus far this year – but he hasn’t looked like his usually dominant self dating back to the 2023 Stanley Cup playoffs when he posted a 3.56 GAA and an .875 SP in six games against Toronto. Vasilevskiy looked worn down back then, but now, he just looks like he’s thinking the game too much and not reacting with the positionally sound approach that has worked so well for him as he carved out an iconic legacy with the Bolts.

At a salary cap hit of $9.5 million through the 2027-28 campaign, Vasilevskiy has to be doing better than that. The alternative – journeyman Jonas Johansson (3.44 GAA, .892 SP) – can’t be relied on to play the lion’s share of Tampa Bay’s remaining games, so the pressure is squarely on Vasilevsky to recalibrate and rejuvenate his game. 

The Lightning are in fifth place in the Atlantic Division, three points behind the fourth-place Maple Leafs, but the Leafs have three games in hand. Sixth-place Montreal is just two points behind Tampa, with the Canadiens holding a game in hand on them. Another stretch of terrible hockey and the Lightning could find themselves in seventh place in the division. That’s a place no one thought they’d be in. GM Julien BriseBois knows a cap crunch is coming, and if there are few positive results in the looming weeks and months, bigger moves could be coming for the Bolts.

Meanwhile, in St. Louis, the Blues also are a highly inconsistent bunch. 

They currently sit in fifth spot in the Central Division with a 12-10-1 mark, and like the Lightning, they also have just one win streak of more than two games – a three-game win streak that ended in mid-November. But they’ve dropped three of their past five games and five of their past nine, and they’ve been overtaken for the fourth spot in the Central by the Arizona Coyotes. 

On paper, the Blues should be much better than the Coyotes, but unlike the Lightning, St. Louis’ problems have more to do with its anemic offense than anything else.

The Blues have a wealth of talented forwards and a strong defense corps, but they’re currently only 23rd in goals-for per game with 2.91. Only one of their players – top-line center Robert Thomas – is averaging at least a point per game, and only two of them have a points-per-game average of better than 0.65. 

St. Louis GM Doug Armstrong wasn’t afraid last year to peel off veterans (and looming UFAs) Ryan O’Reilly and Vladimir Tarasenko when the playoffs were no longer a reasonable goal for the organization, so it will be intriguing to see if and when Armstrong decides enough’s enough this year and starts trading away more veterans.

Neither the Lightning nor the Blues have any meaningful amount of cap space left to mix things up the rest of the way this year, so we could be looking at two teams that won’t truly arrive at a roster crossroads until next summer. They’re far from also-rans, but they’re underachieving in a way that’s worrisome in the short and long terms. 

We’re still in the early part of the second quarter of the season, but time is of the essence for them to turn things around. If they fail to and the Jekyll-and-Hyde routine continues, their management will have little choice but to make major changes.