The Lightning Might Be Better off without Superstar Steven Stamkos

Brian Boyle sat hunched over in his stall in the visitor's locker room at the Barclays Center, surrounded by the hordes of media. The 6'7" forward spoke barely above a whisper, seemingly uncomfortable with the attention he'd drawn. He was quiet enough that after he finished speaking, one member of the media called his availability "unusable."

This is the 31-year-old Boyle, he of just 12 goals in 91 career playoff games. He isn't the type of player that screams offence. In fact, before Boyle scored the overtime goal to give the Tampa Bay Lightning a 5-4 win and a 2-1 series lead against the New York Islanders, Boyle's most newsworthy contribution to the matchup was a pregame centre-ice skirmish with Islanders defenceman Travis Hamonic and then what appeared to be a hit to the head of defenceman Thomas Hickey.

"We believe in ourselves," said Boyle. "You've got to create those chances somehow."

These are the Tampa Bay Lightning of the 2016 Stanley Cup playoffs. The word that came up again and again after their win was "resilience" and even if Boyle isn't normally the type of player the Lightning would turn to to provide offence, in the absence of Steven Stamkos—the team's leading regular-season goal scorer—his role has changed.

The roles of many Lightning players have changed, in fact. Stamkos' blood clot in his right arm has kept him out of action since April, and didn't exactly inspire a ton of confidence in the Lightning's playoff chances. Yet here we are, with the Lightning—tied for third in the postseason in goals per game—in the driver's seat heading into Game 4 Friday.

"We're missing two big guys from our team," said Lightning forward Tyler Johnson, the leading goal scorer in the 2015 playoffs and Tampa's leading scorer this postseason. "There's no denying that. No one's going to replace them. As a collective whole, everyone has to try and step up and do their part."

There's no denying the game-changing prowess that the 26-year-old Stamkos possesses. Many a team in the NHL would love to have Stamkos on their roster. And you can bet there will be teams overpaying for his services if the pending UFA does indeed hit the market this summer. But Boyle's goal is symptomatic of a larger issue at play here: as the offence continues to chug along without Stamkos and the rumour mill of offseason moves has already begun to churn, it's worth wondering if this Stamkos-less Lightning team might be better off without the sniper.

Yes, the suggestion in and of itself verges dangerously close to a hot take. This Lightning team's success this postseason without its captain and leading goal scorer in six of the last seven regular seasons ought to be viewed as an opportunity, not a fluke: if Steve Yzerman's team can build off the success it had as Stanley Cup finalists last season and continue finding the back of the net this postseason, there should be little reason for the Lightning GM to even consider paying Stamkos the Kane and Toews-type deals ($84 million over eight years) that the Lightning forward is likely to command.

It's hard to say right now if the Lightning are a better team without Stamkos, as the playoffs are far from over. But they're trending in the right direction. Tuesday's win in front of a raucous Barclays Center crowd spoke to the capabilities of this team. Even after being outshot 17-9 in the first, the Lightning scored with less than a minute left in the period.

"It has a lot to do with experience," Johnson said of the way the Lightning clawed back into the game. "I think we learned a lot of that last year. It's never over until it's over.

"We've been in a lot of different situations that we know we can come back from."

And after the Islanders took a 3-2 lead early in the third period, the Lightning responded in less than a minute with a goal from Vladislav Namestnikov. And to hear Lightning coach Jon Cooper tell the story, that goal might have been the difference.

"Let's not underscore Namestikov's goal," he said. "We answered in less than a minute. And that calmed everything down for us."

This is a calm that the team found without its captain, no less.

"That's a staple of how this team has come together in the last few years, especially in playoff time," added Cooper. "It's amazing when you've been in that situation before, how there's just a quiet calm that comes over the team. I don't think there was one person on that bench that didn't think we were going to overtime."

On the other side of the ice, it was easy to see what can happen when a team relies heavily on one or two elite players and doesn't see results: the Islanders' two leading regular-season scorers, John Tavares and Kyle Okposo, were both held pointless and were -2 on the night.

So is the Lightning's playoff success so far without Stamkos a case of the Ewing Theory, a thought that essentially a team performs better when its best player is out of the lineup?

These playoffs are not the first time Stamkos has been out of the Lightning lineup and they've survived just fine. According to War on Ice, when Stamkos was out of the lineup with a broken tibia from Nov. 12 to March 5 during the 2013-14 season, the Lightning had a better even-strength goals for/against ratio (+19) and were generating more scoring chances per 60 minutes (30.3) than when Stamkos returned to the lineup for the last two months of the regular season. (Even goals for/against, 29.3 SCF/60)

What's more, since then the Lightning have added young scorer Jonathan Drouin, he's looked like nothing short of an emerging star, despite all the drama that surrounded him this season. He was levelled by a Thomas Hickey hit that Cooper called "thunderous" and after leaving the ice and clearing baseline tests, eventually returned to deliver a beautiful pass and the primary assist on Nikita Kucherov's game-tying goal with less than a minute remaining in regulation.

Talk about resilience, both in Game 3 and throughout Drouin's tumultuous season.

"What happened tonight just spells out his character and what he's about," said Cooper. "I'm really proud of him. The story's not over. We're in the first couple chapters. This guy, I think, is going to write one heck of a hockey story for himself."

As the Lightning continue to score and Stamkos' return date remains unclear, Drouin and the rest of the Lightning have the opportunity to write their own story. The leading man might not make an appearance, but it's a show worth seeing, nonetheless.