TAMPA — The Lightning fell to the defending Stanley Cup champions for the second time in a week, losing 4-3 to the St. Louis Blues Wednesday night at Amalie Arena.
“You’re not going to win every game,” Lightning coach Jon Cooper said. “We’ve made some pretty good strides.”
Cooper said he saw a good hockey game Wednesday. He added that he saw improvements from the last time his team played St. Louis on Nov. 19. But in the end, everything came down to special teams. Each team got a power-play goal, but St. Louis edged Tampa Bay with the shorthanded goal.
Blues’ Oskar Sundqvist scored two goals before leaving with an injury and Blues goalie Jordan Binnington stopped 32 shots.
Early in the second period, Sundquvist skipped the puck through Lightning defenseman Victor Hedman’s legs onto the open ice and started sprinting toward Andrei Vasilevskiy at the goal. Hedman couldn’t catch up, and Nikita Kucherov couldn’t disrupt Sundqvist’s momentum, either. And it didn’t take much for Sundqvist to come out on top in the one-on-one situation against Vasilevskiy.
“It is what it is,” Hedman said. “It’s tough when you get caught in moments like that. It’s a split-second read and I got caught standing still, and the puck bounced.”
But even with the loss — and the misread — the defenseman said he isn’t deterred.
“I thought we battled hard,” Hedman said. “If we keep playing like this, we’re going to have a lot of success down the stretch.”
Tampa Bay got goals from Kucherov, Anthony Cirelli and Brayden Point. Vasilevskiy made 29 saves. The Lightning, who entered scoring on an NHL-best 41.2 percent of their power plays at home, went 1 for 4. St. Louis scored on one of its two chances.
The special teams unit finally paid off at the courtesy of Point, who found a way to slip the puck past Binnington after racing down the slot late in the third period.
The penalty kill was also put to work Wednesday when the Lightning had to fight off 1:44 in a 5-on-3 situation. But a valiant effort turned to naught when the play resumed at 5-on-4.
St. Louis’ Brayden Schenn — brother to Lightning defenseman Luke Schenn — found the open net as Tampa Bay’s Alex Killorn made his way out of the box. The Blues extended their lead by two with about nine minutes to go in the final period.
“(It’s a) tough break for that to happen,” defenseman Kevin Shattenkirk said. “But all in all, it was a good game, and one we feel like we should have a point coming out of.”
A last-ditch effort to pull Vasilevskiy for the extra man with two minutes to go wasn’t enough.
“They did a good job clogging up the front of their net,” Point said. “We got some chances. We had the puck in there for a long time, maybe a minute or so, but (Binnington) makes a couple of really good saves. We come up with nothing, but there’s a lot to build on.”
Information from Associated Press was used in this report.
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November 28, 2019 at 05:30PM
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