Lightning advances to second round

TAMPA, FLA.» The Tampa Bay Lightning understands what it takes to be successful in the Stanley Cup playoffs.

“You need your best players to be the best players, and they rose to the occasion,” coach Jon Cooper said Saturday after the top seed in the Eastern Conference beat the New Jersey Devils 3-1, ending the first-round series in five games.

“People are going to look at this series and say: ‘Oh, 4-1. Tampa took it to them.’ Anybody that was actually watching these games knew clearly that’s not what happened in this series,” Cooper added. “It was fought from the drop of the puck to the end. We just happened to get big goals at the right time.”

Nikita Kucherov scored his 27th career postseason goal and Andrei Vasilevskiy stopped 26 shots for the Lightning, which advanced to a second-round matchup against either the Boston Bruins or Toronto Maple Leafs.

Kucherov, the NHL’S thirdleading scorer during the regular season with 100 points, had five goals and five assists in the five games, setting a franchise record for points in a playoff series. He also tied Vincent Lecavalier for second-place on the club’s alltime postseason scoring list.

“I thought he elevated (his play) throughout the series, no question,” Cooper said of the 24-yearold, two-time all-star, who has 27 goals and 25 assists in 50 career playoff games.

Mikhail Sergachev became the youngest player in Lightning history to score a playoff goal and Ryan Callahan, back in the lineup after missing the previous two games with an upper-body injury, sealed it with an empty-netter for the Atlantic Division champions with 1.7 seconds remaining.

Capitals 4, Blue Jackets 3, OT. WASHINGTON» Overtime came at the perfect time for Washington.

Outshot, outskated and outplayed by Columbus in a lopsided third period of Game 5, the Capitals went into their locker room at intermission with no choice but to talk about what went wrong in blowing yet another lead.

”We knew we had to be better,” Nicklas Backstrom said.

Better they were in a dominant overtime that Backstrom ended 11:53 in with his second goal of the game to give Washington a 3-2 lead over the Blue Jackets in the first-round series. Thanks to goaltender Braden Holtby making 15 of his 39 saves in the third period and Backstrom’s first two goals of these playoffs, the Metropolitan Division champions can close out Columbus on the road Monday in Game 6.

The playoff-tested Capitals took punch after punch when they were outshot 16-1 by the Blue Jackets in the third period, including Oliver Bjorkstrand’s deflection goal 2:30 in that tied it. Holtby made saves in quantity and quality, most notably on Columbus No. 1 center Pierre-luc Dubois on a rebound and again on an attempt to bat the puck out of the air, to get to overtime for the fourth time in five games this series.

Maple Leafs 5, Bruins 3. BOSTON»

Tyler Bozak and James van Riemsdyk scored 1:19 apart in the second period, and then Toronto killed off a 5-on-3 and three more power plays in a row to beat Boston in Game 5 and avoid playoff elimination.

Connor Brown and Andreas Johnsson each scored his first career playoff goal in the first period, and the Maple Leafs took a 4-1 lead to chase Tuukka Rask in the second.

Boston cut the deficit to one goal, but the Leafs held on.

Frederik Andersen stopped 42 shots for Toronto.

Jake Debrusk and Sean Kuraly scored for the Bruins.