Tampa's problem looks a lot like that. The Lightning are 8-3-2 and can score with anybody: 6 on Vegas, 6 on Winnipeg, 4 in the Halloween shootout loss in Nashville. They have also allowed 4 or more in 4 straight games, and the blue line keeps getting thinner. Victor Hedman was back on the projected third pair for Nashville, but Erik Cernak was a late scratch with an undisclosed injury, so Tampa had 1 fewer regular on the right side.
The forward group has its own holes. Zemgus Girgensons (lower body) and Yanni Gourde (hip) are both out, which pushes guys like Jakob Viel and Conor Geekie into a reshuffled bottom 6. The top of the lineup is fine. Jake Guentzel, Brayden Point and Nikita Kucherov were together again on the projected top line, with Brandon Hagel and Anthony Cirelli behind them. Missing 2 centers mostly hurts the defensive minutes and the penalty kill, and those are the areas that have been leaking.
The schedule matters more than anything else here. Detroit plays the Panthers on November 2 and then makes the short trip across the state for a 7:00 PM ET puck drop the next night, so this is the second game of a back-to-back. Whoever starts in goal after Gibson faced Florida, and how many minutes the top defensemen logged in Sunrise, could look very different by Tuesday. The Panthers game is also a chance for Detroit to prove the St. Louis 3rd period was a one-off, or to show it wasn't.
Tampa is 2-3 over its last 5 as of today, but 3 of those 5 were 1-goal games and 1 of them went to a shootout. This isn't a slumping team. It's a team that scores 4 a night and gives up just as many. If Cernak comes back and the Lightning can keep a tired Detroit team to the outside, the home side should be comfortable. If Detroit's depth scoring shows up the way it did for 40 minutes against St. Louis, a team that has given up 4+ in 4 straight is exactly the kind of opponent it can trade chances with.
