Ben Bishop says contract status not an excuse for his sub-par numbers

by Erik Erlendsson | @Erik_Erlendsson | Like us on Facebook
December 9, 2016

BRANDON, Fla. – Ben Bishop exudes confidence. It pours out of him like sweat beading down off his forehead during a double overtime playoff game.

Yet, something seems amiss this season. Things look a little off.

Certainly the numbers Bishop has posted this season show he’s not the same. An 8-10-1 record, 2.86 goals against average and .906 save percentage are far from expectations for a two-time Vezina Trophy Finalist who led the league in save percentage last season. He likely will not be starting when Tampa Bay hosts the defending Stanley Cup champion Pittsburgh Penguins on Saturday (Fox Sports Sun, 7 p.m.), though that decision is likely more based on the schedule and not performance.

But why does Bishop, who knocked a puck that caromed off the end boards in to his own net with his glove, look like somebody who’s lost his confidence?

Truth is he hasn’t lost that belief in himself, even if appearances suggest otherwise.

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“I feel fine,” Bishop said Friday following practice at the Ice Sports Forum. “We go back and watch the games and technically it’s all there. There is really no difference from the way I’ve played the last couple of years to now. I don’t like saying this, but it’s been a strange season with goofy goals on tips and bounces, goals off your own players. So I think if you took some of those away, the numbers would be pretty similar to years past. I would like to get the wins a little higher.
“So personally I feel fine, I’m staying with the system and I don’t feel any different to be honest. I know it doesn’t look that way with some of the results, but a lot of these games that are 4-1, could easily be 2-1 or 3-1 and all those goals start to add up over time. I feel good playing the puck, I feel good out there.”

Seeing Bishop look anything like his old self, however, does pose the question about whether or not his focus is as laser sharp as it’s been in previous years.

After all, Bishop is in a very precarious lame duck situation. He is a pending unrestricted free agent at the end of this season and it’s not any sort of a secret that he will most likely be playing elsewhere next season. The Lightning all but made that announcement over the summer.

During draft week in June, the Lightning were reportedly close to a deal to send Bishop to the Calgary Flames if a contract extension could be reached between Calgary and Bishop. That didn’t come to fruition and the Flames instead acquired Brian Elliott from St. Louis.

Then Andrei Vasilevskiy was signed to a three-year extension on July 1, which all but confirmed he would be the No. 1 for Tampa Bay no later than the start of the 2017-18 season.

That has to creep in to Bishop’s mindset in some capacity, right?

“I’d be lying if I said I never thought about it, but that is only something that is going to distract you from your job so I try not to think about what is next,” Bishop said. “I just try to worry about the next game because when you start to think about that other stuff is when your game gets out of whack, when you are thinking about something other than what you should be. I have done it in the past, so it’s not a completely new thing to me. It’s definitely there in the back of your head.”

Bishop watched teammate Steven Stamkos go through the same sort of situation last year, only on a higher profile level. The Lightning goaltender has spoken to Stamkos to ask for some advice on handling every thing from a mental standpoint.

“It’s not easy on anybody, but at the same time you can’t really think about it because it does no good to yourself or the team when you start to think about that type of stuff, especially in the situation we are in right now,” Bishop said. “We have way more important things to think about. . . . I’ve have plenty of other things to think about. You know it’s there, but it’s not like I’m sitting at home thinking about it, I’m thinking about the next game, to be honest. You want to play well, you want to get out of this funk, so that’s on my mind way more than anything else.”

Despite the slip in numbers, there is no confidence lost from Bishop’s teammates. Defenseman Victor Hedman was quick to respond to that when asked.

“Nope, not at all,” Hedman said. “You can see, talking to (the media) after and to us during the game, he’s the same. There is nothing different about him. We have just given up way too many goals and we have to sort that out. . . . He’s saved us so many times you lose count. So it’s up to us to play better in front of him and do a better job of letting him have the opportunities to see the puck and make those saves. So it’s upon us to play better in front of him.”

Lightning head coach Jon Cooper said he has no concerns about Bishop’s confidence level, despite how things look on the surface.

“Ben is not one of those guys where I sit here and say confidence is a problem with him,” Cooper said. “I think it goes the other way. I think when stuff like this happens he usually digs his heels in. You look at his last two games prior to (Thursday vs. Vancouver), he was a rock back there for us. But it’s kind of going with the wake of our team right now, when a bad one goes in like that second one, everybody went down. And the one guy I would say that was there for us when things were kind of really going bad (against Vancouver) was Bish. When it was 3-0, Ben had to make three or four Grade A saves just to keep us kind of within striking distance.

“So I’m not worried about him, he’s a confident kid, he’s been in this league awhile and he’s the least of our worries.”

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