TAMPA, Fla. — One of the reasons so many people picked the Tampa Bay Lightning to not only beat the Montreal Canadiens in the first round but also likely come out of the East was because of a veteran core with a championship pedigree.

This is a team with a Hart Trophy winner in Nikita Kucherov, who may win another one this year.

This is a team with a Vezina Trophy winner in Andrei Vasilevskiy, who may also win another one this year.

This is a team with a former 50-goal scorer in Brayden Point, who had 33 points in the 2020 Stanley Cup playoffs alone.

The Lightning need those three guys to step up right about now before their season ends in Round 1 yet again.

Let’s start with Kucherov. Despite leading the Bolts with eight shots on goal Wednesday night, he was held pointless. He had a big tying goal in Game 2 and set up the game winner in Game 4, but for the most part, his 6 points (one goal, five assists) in the series feel like empty calories. This is not the superstar performance we are used to seeing. And his frustration is evident.

“Bad body language,” one NHL scout watching the game Wednesday night told The Athletic.

He’s a perfectionist by nature. No one’s harder on Kucherov than himself. He’s not having his way in this series.

I would have loved to have asked Kucherov about all this, but he was not available postgame despite being requested by the media to speak. He’s spoken only once to the media all series, after Game 2. He rarely speaks to the media in Tampa throughout the entire season. I’m sure he has his reasons for why he doesn’t like to do it, but for a guy who might win another Hart Trophy and was just nominated this week for the Ted Lindsay Award as voted on by his peers, his refusal to speak is a lack of leadership. He wears an “A” on his jersey.

Imagine Connor McDavid or Sidney Crosby or Alex Ovechkin or Nathan MacKinnon doing one single media availability during a playoff series? Imagine the outcry?

Don’t the fans of the Tampa Bay Lightning deserve to hear from No. 86 to find out what he’s thinking right now?

I’ll tell you who came out to face the media on this night — Point. And he didn’t duck the question when asked about his lack of productivity in this series.

“Yeah, we need other guys to score, and I haven’t been able to do it,” Point said. “It is frustrating. But you just try to keep doing the right things and working hard. Yeah, we’re going to need myself and other guys to step up for sure.”

I just don’t think Point is 100 percent. He suffered that knee injury, which knocked him out of the Olympics, but he just hasn’t looked the same the rest of the season, limited to just one goal in his final 11 regular-season games and one power-play goal in five playoff games. He’s just not himself. But if he’s putting on the uniform, the expectation is for him to produce.

Which brings us to Vasilevskiy, who had struggled in three consecutive playoffs entering this spring, going back to losing to Toronto in ’23 (.875 save percentage), Florida in ’24 (.897) and Florida again last year (.872). He’s got an .880 save percentage now through five games, but it’s the game winner Wednesday night that will be remembered in this series if Tampa Bay doesn’t come back to win it.

Alexandre Texier’s shot can’t go in from there. That’s a soft goal by any measure. And it came on the same day he was nominated for the Vezina Trophy.

“It’s not on him,” Tampa Bay veteran Corey Perry said postgame. “He’s done a lot of good things for this team this year. It’s not on him. It’s on the guys in front of him.”

Lightning forward Dominic James echoed that sentiment.

“He’s the best goalie in the world,” James said postgame. “So we have all the trust in the world in Vasy. And we’re going to stick by our guy. He keeps us in every single game. Like I said, best goalie in the world and he’s going to continue to be.”

Head coach Jon Cooper isn’t about to throw a goalie who helped the Bolts win two Stanley Cup titles under the bus, either.

“Listen, I don’t play the position. I think that’s one of the toughest positions in sports,” Cooper began postgame, when asked about Texier’s game winner. “The fact is, we had ample time to get another one back. But it stems from way before that, it doesn’t stem by the time Texier gets on the ice. It stems from the (line) change and how we went about it and the mistakes we made on the way there.

“Forever, all Vasy does is bail us out of those,” Cooper continued. “The rare time, sometimes he doesn’t. But (Texier) should have never got that deep in our zone. And he got a lot on it. It wasn’t like Vasy got beat; he had it and it took a Montreal bounce. It was a little unfortunate for us. But we had ample time and ample chances to tie it. But we didn’t.”

I would defend my goalie as well in Cooper’s shoes. Vasilevskiy has earned that from everyone in the organization. But the fact of the matter is, what appeared to be a mismatch between a veteran, championship-pedigree goalie versus a rookie with zero playoff experience is at best a tie through five games and perhaps, one might argue, a slight edge to Jakub Dobeš, who had 38 saves Wednesday night.

So that in itself should be worrisome for Tampa Bay.

So should the fact Brandon Hagel and Jake Guentzel are completely carrying the team offensively by themselves. They need help. As Point himself said, he and others need to score.

Otherwise, this is a Lightning team facing a fourth consecutive first-round exit from the Stanley Cup playoffs.

Game 6 in Montreal on Friday night, in what will be a wild Bell Centre, will be the ultimate test this season for Tampa Bay.

“We got no choice now. We either show up or we’re out,” Point said. “That’s the mentality.”

Added Perry: “This is when you got to push and really see what you’re made of.”

What especially disappointed the Lightning on Wednesday night was how flat they came out in such a pivotal game. How they gave up that early goal to Brendan Gallagher and then pretty much chased the game most of the night.

How does that happen in your own building in a Game 5?

“Is it really disappointing to come home and lose? It is,” Cooper said.

But in a closely played series where the teams are separated by one goal through five games, the Tampa Bay head coach sounded confident about his team’s ability to bounce back Friday night.

“I bet we’ll play better (Friday night) than we did tonight,” he said.

I would never bet against a Lightning team that’s accomplished so much as a group. But if they’re going to win the next two games and win the series, Kucherov, Point and Vasilevskiy will need to be better.

And nobody knows that better than those three.