Raw Charge
Summary
It’s Sunday night. What else is going on? Well, yes football is on, but why not read some random hockey thoughts in between plays? Tonight we’re going to take a quick look at the Tampa Bay Lightning power play. It was a talking point at the end of last season, through the summer, and, now to begin the season as it’s one of the few parts of the game that isn’t clicking in the Lightning’s 4-1-0 start to the season that has them atop the Atlantic Division. Some might say that they are struggling at 2-for-20 (10%) on the season. As the resident keeper of sunshine and rainbows for Lightning Nation, we like to say that they are 2-for-their-last-7 (28.6%). Yeah, that sounds a lot better. One thing we want to point out before you read the next 1,900+ words – we are still well within the small sample size portion of the season. The Bolts could go out and drop three power play goals on the Rangers on Tuesday and all of the stats are flip-flopped around. On the other hand, the Lightning have had five games to figure things out, and, at times, they are still looking a bit discombobulated with the extra skater at times. So, we feel it’s at least worth a few minutes to see what’s going on to start the season. For the most part, they have held off making any changes from what everyone assumed they would roll out. The first unit of Nikita Kucherov, John Carlson, Jake Guentzel, Brandon Hagel, and Brayden Point has seen the bulk of play. There may be no team in the league that rolls its top unit out more than the Lightning, and outside of the occasional Anthony Cirelli appearance to take a face-off, it’s been pretty much those five players. There are some new faces on the second unit next to Cirelli as he’s joined by Conor Geekie, Gage Goncalves, Charle-Edouard D’Astous, and Pontus Holmberg. The first unit is playing a style fans are used to seeing. They like to carry the puck in with speed, set up along the boards and get the puck into the hands of Nikita Kucherov. Point heads to the slot, Guentzel down low, Hagel to the left circle, and Carlson to the point. Everything runs through Kucherov and Carlson, much like it was run through Kucherov and Darren Raddysh last season. In an ideal world, they would get goals off of deflections on shots from Carlson, one-timers from Point in the slot, or from Hagel crashing the net on rebounds. It’s been a less-than-ideal start to the season. At times they’ve been able to run the plays they want and create some chances, but for too much of their time with the extra skater it hasn’t paid off with goals. Why? We’ll get to our thoughts on that in the minute, but first let’s take a look at a couple of things. They’re not the only ones Over the first handful of games of the season, it looks like teams on a whole are converting at a slightly lower rate than they did last year. In 2025-26, the league converted 21.1% of their power play opportunities. So far this season, the NHL is at 20.5%. While the Lightning’s 10% success rate is less than ideal, there are six teams that are in the single digits, including three in the Bolts own division. The Canadiens and Sabres are currently at 5.9% while Florida is at 3.6%. The Lightning are struggling, but they’re not the worst. Early on it appears that the penalty kill is ahead of the power play around the league. The Avalanche led the league last year with an 84.6% kill rate. As of the time of writing 12 teams are above that mark this year, including three of the teams the Lightning have faced – Capitals (86.7%), Rangers (89.5%), and Wild (94.1%). In fact, the only power play goal Minnesota has surrendered so far this season was John Carlson’s tally on Thursday. The beauty of percentages and small sample sizes is that single games can swing numbers by a significant amount. At this point, a couple of teams going 3-for-3 with the extra skater could bump league wide numbers overall. Will the power play numbers start creeping up as the games pile up? It’s possible. In fact, that’s exactly what happened last season. Through the first ten days of the 2025-26 season, teams were converting at 20.5% on the power play with four teams at 10% or worse on the season. It seems, much like pitching is ahead of hitting at the start of a baseball season, penalty kills are ahead of power plays. There is a bit of reason in that. Power plays tend to rely on rhythm and timing and it’s an aspect of the game that just can’t be replicated in practice. Yes, a team can work on their set plays and fire pucks on their goaltenders, but there is no way they can match an opponent’s speed and effort. That can only happen in games. Theoretically, as these units get more reps at game speed, they should get better at scoring goals. The Good There isn’t a lot to write home about when a power play is 2-for-20 on the season. After all, if they were doing a lot of good things, they probably wouldn’t be 2-for-20. That being said, there are some positives. First off, they have drawn plenty of penalties. Through Sunday they are seventh in the league in total opportunities and sixth in opportunities per game with 4.00. That is a good sign that they are possessing the puck a lot and playing at a pace that is forcing their opponents to make mistakes. With the talent they have, the more chances they get, the more likely they will score. Second, they are winning face-offs when they have the extra skater. As a team they are at 54.3% on draws while on the power play. Now in the grand scheme of things, that ranks 21st in the league this season, but it is 2% higher than what they averaged last season, and the two players that take the most draws are above the team’s average. Anthony Cirelli is at 57.1% while Jake Guentzel is at 60% when they’re in the dot for draws. The more times they can win a draw on the power play, especially in the offensive zone, the easier it is for them to get into their structure and start moving the puck around. It would be nice to get them up closer to 60% as a whole, but as long as Cirelli and Guentzel are doing well, they should be in decent shape. While they might not have goals to show for it, two of the players the Lightning want to get the most scoring chances are getting them. Brayden Point (9) and Brandon Hagel (6) are leading the team in individual scoring chances. They want Point pulling the trigger on shots from the slot. One of the differences between last year, and the games that he played in last season, is that the center is getting opportunities. He just hasn’t converted them yet. So why the stuggle? If the Bolts are winning face-offs and getting chances from in close, why aren’t they scoring more? Well, in two of the games, some credit has to go to the opposing goaltender. Charlie Lindgren and Dan Vladar turned aside some quality chances as the Lightning combined for 20 shot attempts, 7 shots on goal, 12 scoring chances, and 7 high-danger chances in 12 minutes of power play time against the Capitals and Flyers. Those numbers translate to an expected goals of 2.09, and the Bolts got bupkus. On a whole, though, they just aren’t generating enough offense. They are currently 24th in both shots for and expected goals. They are 21st in scoring chances and 16th in high-danger chances. That’s just not good enough for a team with the talent they possess. Part of it is that teams can pretty much focus on one side of the ice. Any fan that has watched a Lightning power play can guess whose stick those shots are coming off of on the power play. It’s John Carlson (11 shot attempts) and Nikita Kucherov (7 shot attempts). Even three of Hagel’s eight shot attempts have come from in front of or on the right side of the ice. With no right-handed shot in the left circle, the threat of a one-timer from that side of the ice is almost non-existent. So teams can focus on Point in the middle of the ice or Kucherov, knowing that if the puck does work its way over to the left circle, they will have time to slide over to defend it. Even when the Lightning’s power play was clicking last year (which it was before the one-goal-in-ten-games stretch that they ended the season with) the goals were coming from the point (Darren Raddysh) or the right-side of the ice. Hagel had a few, but so did Oliver Bjorkstrand, who is a right-hand shot. Another thing that the graphic above shows is that they aren’t getting enough opportunities from right in front of the net. The deflections and rebounds haven’t been there yet. One of Carlson’s biggest assets is that he gets his shots through the first line of defense and on net. Of his 11 shot attempts, only three have been blocked so far, but only one shot has created a rebound so far. The opposing goaltenders are getting too clean of a look at his shots coming from the point. If the Bolts can get more traffic in front, it will create a little more chaos, and that’s always good on the power play. The Lightning have been pretty stubborn in sticking with their system. Yes, they tinkered with a different look in practice last week, but they’ve yet to deploy it. Part of that might have been due to those games against Washington and Philadelphia, where they were getting some chances. Since then, they have scored twice, but have struggled to maintain constant pressure. It is probably time that they try something different, if for no reason other than to shake things up and have players get a slightly different look. It’s also something they could do while keeping the same personnel on the ice. At this stage it might be worthwhile to bump Point out of the bumper spot. Let him at least start the cycle out wide so that he possibly gets a little lost. His one-timer has never been a strength, but even if he is just shoveling shots on net, or crashing from that side on rebounds, he’s in a better position to handle things than a left-hand shot like Hagel. It eliminates the one-timer from the slot/bumper spot, but it gives Kucherov and Carlson another option when they have the puck and could spread the defense out a little more. Another option is to swap Guentzel and Kucherov down low a little more. They did it a little against the Islanders due to the way they were cycling the puck. Again it gives the other team a little different look. When they went back to their usual look, the Islanders backed off of Guentzel a little, which gave him the room to step out and beat Ilya Sorokin. Final Thoughts The power play was something that the very good Lightning team could improve on from last season. They chose not to add any personnel in free agency or via trade. Through five games they haven’t altered their system either. It’s still a little too early to press the panic button, especially since they’ve been playing so well in most of the other aspects of their game. Still, it’s something to keep an eye on as the season progresses. Even when Steven Stamkos was on the team, they were extremely streaky as a team when it came to the power play. They had ups-and-downs last season. After the disastrous end to the season (1-for-32) they scored 5 times in 7 games against the Canadiens in the playoffs. With the talent they have, they are always a danger to rip off a 4-goals-in-7-chances stretch of play that makes everyone declare things are fixed despite not really changing their attack. The goal is to be better in Game 84 than they were in Game 5. As long as they are getting better with the extra skater as the season goes on, things should be okay. If they go another five or six games with middling results, then maybe it’s time to mix things up a little.