Kid, you're going out there an under-utilized first-round draft pick, but you're comin' back...a star?

Since we all have a full week or so before the NHL starts playing ice hockey again around here, let us pause to contemplate the statistical whackadoodle that is your Tampa Bay Lightning, an expansion franchise that's won exactly as many Stanley Cups in the 18 years of its existence as the Boston Bruins have won since shortly before Richard Nixon conspired to obstruct justice.

(And the Lightning got to call themselves Stanley Cup champions for two years even though they only won the thing once. They were the carryover champions when the NHL brilliantly immolated itself in 2005.)

This year's Tampa Bay team is preposterously good in special-teams situations. They kill 94.4 percent of the penalties they take, and they convert 26.7 percent of their own power-play chances, which is the best percentage of any of the teams still playing. (The Bruins, by comparison, are a long way just from cracking double-digits in the latter category.) There are a lot of possible reasons for this:



OK, that's one of them.

However, Colin Campbell, the NHL's Dean Of Discipline, seems peeved at the tactic, so who knows how things will be called. Of course, nothing charms This Blog more than a playoff series highlighted by completely arbitrary interpretations on the part of game officials.


Whatever happens, If nothing else, the Lightning are the Montreal Canadiens with better -- Vincent LeCavalier, Martin St. Louis,  Steven Stamkos -- pure scoring talent. This makes the loss of Patrice Bergeron more than simply further evidence that a just power does not control the universe. It puts the Bruins in a big hole in any situation that is not five-on-five.

Enter, one supposes, Tyler Seguin.

Why is this person on the roster if not to energize an anemic, and now crippled, power play? This Blog predicts Seguin wins at least one game in this series.