Patient Hawks Strike Down the Bolts

Welcome to the 2015 Stanley Cup Finals.  The hosts for Game 1, the Tampa Bay Lightning, have a defensive display to put on for everyone, so let's have everyone sit back and enjoy the show.

After shutting down the Rangers transitional offense in the Conference Finals, a lot of people were starting to stand up and say, "hey, those Lightning guys can sure play defense in front of Ben Bishop."  Sure enough, that was what won the series in the end.  They played exceptionally well in their own end, they did a good job to clog up the neutral zone and in essence, suffocated the Rangers into submission.

Needless to say, the Blackhawks have been here before.  Sure, they may be the visitors and didn't have home-ice advantage coming into this series, but did that really matter?  Of course not.

A beautiful goal by Alex Killorn, less than five minutes into the contest, had the Lightning up 1-0 before some guys were finishing their first in-game beer run in the arena.  Killorn made great contact with a bouncing puck, putting it past Corey Crawford in the 1st, but then, that was it for the Tampa offense.

The Lightning, a new group to the biggest stage of the game, said to themselves, we suffocated the Rangers at the end of the series, let's do it again to the Blackhawks.

Let's go back to Game 1 of the Conference Finals, the Lightning lost 2-1 to the Rangers.  They then opened a can of whoop-ass in Games 2 & 3, potting 6 goals a piece.  The Lightning still had to learn how the Rangers played their game before they could play as much defense as they did and they may have put the cart before the horse in this series too.

In the 3rd period, a lacklustre effort at their defensive blueline against an offensive-minded guy like Duncan Keith back there, ended up with a screened shot by rookie Teuvo Teravainen going shelf on Bishop to tie the game and then minutes later, a fortunate bounce found its way to Antoine Vermette's stick and all of a sudden, those crafty Blackhawks were up 2-1 and there wasn't a lot of time for the Lightning to regain whatever offensive momentum was needed to breakthrough the tried and tested playoff defense of the Blackhawks.

It wasn't the prettiest of wins for the Blackhawks, but we're now down to the final two teams and it isn't like any of these two teams are looking to take EVERY game to the prom.  There are going to be some ugly ones.

Vermette with the winner, Crawford the win, the only two Blackhawks worth mentioning from the Playoff Pool sheet, as they were the only ones with 2 points.  Teravainen, if he was on the sheet, would have gotten a mention, but... he was omitted.

As mentioned in the preview, there is only one race left to mention in the Playoff Pool and that's the race for 2nd place.

With the Blackhawks win, indeed, Jesse P. did vault over Thor for 2nd place, taking 3 points from the game, while Thor did not register a single point.  This brought Jesse's team up a point on his closest rival.

What else has this done, you may be asking yourself?  Well, Jesse's team did knock a point off of Fontanna's lead, which is now down to 13 points, 1 point less than the lead that our leader had on Thor at the start of the series.  So, there's that.  Jesse would need this series to be a sweep and for the triplets to get absolutely nothing in this series for any shot, whatsoever... but where there's a chance, right?

Sean L. can be rolled up in that conversation as well, as his gap between his team and Thor's is now down to 7 points, so that has to be considered a small win as well.  A development worth noting at this point in the season, mostly because I want to fill up this space as best as possible.

Game 2 goes on Saturday night, everyone gets a rest and we all get to catch our breath and impatiently wait for the next game.