"You put yourself in the right position to score even though you don't, eventually you're going to," Cooper said. "What I like is we're putting ourselves in positions to score. You saw the chances we missed. Most of our players put those in eight, nine, 10 out of 10 and we didn't score. So that's the frustrating part for everyone. But if you go deeper and (dig through) a little bit of layers, we played a big-time possession team and we were the ones that had the possession, we had the shots, we had the chances. I look at that as an improvement. It's just too bad we didn't win the game."
The important thing for the Lightning is not to get frustrated with their lack of results and abandon the progress they've made in the past month. The amount of chances against has decreased because of their puck management and the smart, simple plays their making in their own zone. Special teams saw a renaissance in November after struggling for much of the first month of the season. And scoring goals has never been an issue for the Lightning. Since 2012-13, no other NHL team has scored as many combined goals as the Bolts (1,788).
"We've got to stick with it," McDonagh said. "There's no use trying to change things or go about trying to do it yourself out there. We've got to do this as a team. Everything our system implies, we need all five guys out there playing well and playing in sync and that's what we're trying to do. We're getting consistent in that, but at the end of the day we need to find the results too. Our group is well aware of that. You can't go anywhere in this league with moral victories. Our group wants to get the results here."