Huge Opening Round Upset

Winning the President's Trophy. A team that does that has gone on to have the best record in the National Hockey League in a given season. Once considered a sign of stability for great teams, it hasn't gone quite that way at times. In the case of this year's winners, the Tampa Bay Lightning, the President's Trophy win meant something else altogether. A first round sweep at the hands of the Columbus Blue Jackets. It also meant the waste of what was a truly historic season for the Bolts.

Here's the raw numbers. With a 62-16-4 record, the Lightning tied the 1995-96 Red Wings for the most wins in a season. Tampa Bay finished with 128 points, which was just short of one huge benchmark, the record 132 points achieved by the 1976-77 Montreal Canadiens (60-8-12). That Habs squad was regarded as one of the best, if not the best, NHL teams ever. But Tampa couldn't get the job done. That I think is going to be the biggest factor that sticks in the craws against the Lightning this summer. They had a dominant regular season, the likes of which we haven't seen in the hockey world in over twenty years. Nikita Kucherov lead the loop with 128 points. Andrei Vasilevskiy lead the league in wins with 39. Tampa lead the league in total goals with 325. it was a season for the ages.

But it all went for a waste. You'd like that with a regular season that the Bolts had, they would romp their way to a Stanley Cup. So that's bad enough, that they lost in the first round. To make matters worse, not only did they get swept in the first round, the blew a 3-0 lead in game one and never really recovered and did it to a franchise that had never won a playoff series before in franchise history. It also goes to show that winning the Presidents Trophy won't exactly guarantee success. Since the award started being given out in 1986, a team that has won it has gone on to the finals 11 times, winning the Stanley Cup eight times. Nobody has won the Cup in the same year they took the Presidents trophy was the 2013 Chicago Blackhawks. So it goes to show that there's no correlation between the Presidents Trophy and winning the cup. One does not guarantee the other.

So its a lot to digest.

The goal by Nick Foligno that got the Jackets on the board in the opener turned the series around. It gave the Jackets hope and it was something that Tampa never really recovered from. For the Jackets, this too had major implications It was the first time that they had won a playoff series in franchise history, so its a major step in the right direction. And its an even bigger feather in their cap that they managed to do it against the best team in hockey. It was solid defense and goaltending, and timely scoring. Columbus did what they had to do to get the job done and now here they sit, waiting on the winner of the Bruins-Leafs series.

Whatever the outcome may be for the Jackets in the next round, this was a huge step in the right direction for the franchise and their confidence in this years playo