from Sam McCaig of The Hockey News,

What have we learned as the 2018-19 NHL season has unfolded? Well, lots of stuff....

The Tampa Bay Lightning are riding high – first place overall – and it doesn’t matter where they play. The NHL’s No. 1 team is No. 1 on the road and (almost) No. 1 at home. The Bolts have the best points percentage on the road (.750, 10-3-1) and they have the second-best points percentage at home (.765, 13-4-0), barely behind Boston (.769, 10-3-0). Tampa Bay is the league’s most lethal team, averaging nearly four goals per game (3.94), while ranking in the top 10 in goals-against average (2.81) despite the fact starting goalie Andrei Vasilevskiy has been sidelined with a fractured foot since mid-November. (He’s expected to return in the next week or two.) The Lightning have advanced to the Eastern Conference final three times – and the Stanley Cup final once – in the past four years, and they’re certainly looking like the team to beat this season.

- Nikita Kucherov and Johnny Gaudreau, at the ripe old age of 25, are the elder statesmen at the top of the NHL scoring race. Among the league’s leading seven scorers, the Lightning’s Kucherov and Calgary Flames’ Gaudreau are the greybeards compared to Mikko Rantanen (22), Nathan MacKinnon (23), Connor McDavid (21), Mitch Marner (21) and Brayden Point (22). The rest of the top 10 (and ties) has some 30-something representation – Alex Ovechkin (33), Blake Wheeler (32) and Claude Giroux (30) – but there’s also another young gun, too, in Buffalo’s Jack Eichel (22). The future looks red-light bright.

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