Tampa Bay Lightning enter playoffs with calm demeanor

TAMPA -- 

Alison Krauss. David Gray.

Such was the extent of the musical inspiration not whipping the Lightning into a collective frenzy on Tuesday as players jammed gear into travel bags a few hours before a charter to Pittsburgh for Game One of their Eastern Conference playoff series .

On many days, in many locker rooms, the offering would have been more raucous. Or at least louder.

But the mood and the approach were more sedate, surprising considering the playoff experience level of the team, still completely in keeping with the narrative coach Guy Boucher used as a preamble to the team’s first playoff appearance since 2007.

“My job is not to get them all psyched up, it’s to calm them down,” said Boucher, who will also make his debut as a coach in the NHL playoffs when the fifth-seeded Lightning visits the fourth-seeded Penguins.

That’s admittedly a simpler theory than practice, especially as scores of crucial players, including leading goal-scorer Steven Stamkos, experience playoff hockey for the first time. Intensity pitches. Anxiety swells and action and consequence become a more ruthless parlay.

Stamkos, in his third season in the NHL, admitted that he expected to become nervous near game time.

“There will probably be a pit in the stomach,” he said.

Left wing Ryan Malone is a bit whimsical about the whole inexperience issue, if not a bit optimistic.

“I think everyone’s been playing in the playoffs since they were a little kid, in the streets, dreaming about it,” he said. “To have a chance to play for the shiny silver thing at the end is always a dream come true, so you always try to soak in any playoff experience you can get. Those first five minutes you’re always going to have with you.”

But while he has already proved he can thrive in a playoff atmosphere, with 16 points in 25 career postseason games, key teammates are yet to get a chance. Forwards Sean Bergenheim, David Thompson, Teddy Purcell; defensemen Victor Hedman, Mike Lundin and Matt Smaby, and goaltender Mike Smith have never appeared in the playoffs. Vincent Lecavalier, leading scorer Martin St. Louis and Pavel Kubina are the remnants from the 2003-2004 Stanley Cup champion team.

But the answer, apparently, is in the system and the style the team has played all season.

“The thing about our team is we’ve played playoff hockey all year long, the way we play our style,” said St. Louis. “We’re not going to turn on a switch. The only thing changes now is it’s a do-or-die situation. That brings up the intensity.”

Boucher says he will not shelter his playoff neophytes from the emotions and pressures they’ll experience before the first faceoff tonight in Consol Energy Center. He’d like them to take them as a challenge, but he knows he may have to adjust, especially if the team makes a deep playoff incursion.

“People always tell me playoffs are a different season, it’s a new season. I don’t believe that,” Boucher said. “It’s the same season that continues. The intensity might go up a little bit, but the problem is, if it’s a new season, it’s because you haven’t played playoff hockey all year long. ... So we’re just going to play the game after we played the last game of our season.”

And there’s comfort in that philosophy for the Lightning, which won seven of its last eight games while safely ensconced in the playoff boundary, and thrashed a Carolina team, 6-2, on the final game of the season that needed a win to qualify for the postseason. The late push helped the Lightning finish with 103 points, second only to the Cup champion team’s 106-point output and tied that team’s mark of 46 wins.

“Our game (tonight) is our game after the Carolina game. That’s how we’re looking at it. We’re playing our same structure of hockey, our same game plan we’ve had all year,” Stamkos said. “We’re coming in excited with lots of energy, but it’s contained energy. It’s not running around. We’re playing smart, the way we’ve played all season.”

That was all very much part of the plan, too. Whereas offensively minded teams have often been bogged down in the playoffs – notably last season as the Eastern Conference champion Washington Capitals were bounced in the first round by Montreal – the Lightning should need to transition, Boucher said, to the style usually required to win 16 games to hoist the Stanley Cup.

“Everything I do is planned for the playoffs,” Boucher said. “The players know that. They bought into that. There’s a different kind of offense that sometimes you want to go run-and-gun because you want to get fancy, and it can be pretty for one play, but nine other plays that you try, it doesn’t look so pretty. We want to make sure we stay away from that. And our top guys, our skill guys – Vinny, St. Louis and (Simon) Gagne and Stamkos – they bought into that a long, long time ago, so it’s not like all of a sudden we’re going to change our game. We’ve grinded it out all year long.”

So there’s no need, apparently, to get all over-excited now.