Fans get some entertainment, Lightning get much-needed win
TAMPA— In a lighter moment in the usually staid press-conference room at the Stanley Cup final, Lightning coach Jon Cooper responded to a question about his expectations for player performance with a tonguein-cheek riff.
“I expect every single guy on our team to have a hat trick tonight and to win,” Cooper said, speaking before Saturday’s Game 2 with the Chicago Blackhawks.
Cooper paused a moment to do the math.
“What would that be . . . twenty (players) . . . 60-0,” he said to laughter.
He was joking, of course, although when later told of Cooper’s comments Jonathan Toews, Chicago’s Captain Serious, thought it necessary to underline the fantastical nature of the coach’s spitballing. Said Toews: “I don’t know if that’s realistic.”
But even if it wasn’t, perhaps it set the tone for a game that featured more than its share of delightfully wide-open moments of chance-trading back and forth. Nobody delivered a hat trick. And the final score didn’t drop any jaws.
But for some entertainingly long stretches on Saturday night, this era of dead-puck hockey was interrupted by the glorious sight of odd-man rushes stacked atop odd-man rushes. The skating was high speed. The passes were on the tape. And, especially in a 10-minute-plus stretch of the second period that featured four goals and ping-pong lead changes, the result was riveting. It was every- thing the conservative Game 1 wasn’t, including a 4-3 Lightning win. The best-of-seven series, tied 1-1, moves to Chicago for Games 3 and 4 beginning Monday.
“High-paced game, two skilled teams going at it — it was a lot of fun,” said Victor Hedman, the Lightning defenceman.
It was fun, but the aftermath, for the victors, was nothing to laugh about. Tampa Bay starting goaltender Ben Bishop, suffering from an apparent injury, left the game in the third period, leaving the crease to 20-year-old rookie Andrei Vasilevskiy, who stopped five shots down the stretch to secure the win. Precisely what was ailing Bishop wasn’t clear, although there was speculation that Marian Hossa’s stick, jammed under Bishop’s left pad on a third-period goal by Chicago’s Brent Seabrook that tied it 3-3, may have done the damage.
Whatever the case, the Lightning professed faith in their Russian second-stringer, who, according to the Elias Sports Bureau, became the first NHL goaltender to earn his first playoff victory in relief in the Cup final since 1928 when Lester Patrick, the coach of the New York Rangers, strapped on the pads to finish out an overtime win over the Canadiens.
“He’s a big boy,” Tampa captain Steven Stamkos said of Vasilevskiy, “and we have confidence in him.”
Said Cooper: “The one thing about Vasilevskiy . . . when Bish had to leave, there wasn’t an ounce of stress on anybody on our bench, including myself. The kid proved it when he went in. He was great.”
Certainly the Lightning were in need of an electric effort after a 2-1 loss in Game 1. And while it was wrong to call Game 2 a “must win,” as some players did, it was a close approximation of such. There’d been 12 previous instances of a road club sweeping the opening two games of the Stanley Cup final. More than half of those teams — seven, to be precise — went on to sweep the series. Ten out of 12 won the Cup.
Given the stakes, the Blackhawks were expecting serious pushback from the home team. And they got it. Tampa Bay controlled the bulk of the early run. Tyler Johnson hit an early-first-period post on a great feed from Nikita Kucherov. The Amalie Arena foghorn even tooted a fraction of a note of premature celebration when J.T. Brown fired a shot that went just wide midway through the opening frame.
But the horn was put to appropriate use soon enough, after Cedric Paquette’s wrister through traffic beat Corey Crawford to make it 1-0 for the Lightning.
Scoring first, mind you, hasn’t been enough to win of late on hockey’s biggest stage. Five of the previous seven games in the Stanley Cup final had been won by a team that overcame a deficit at some point. So it wasn’t surprising, necessarily, that the Blackhawks bounced back in short order, Andrew Shaw and Teuvo Teravainen scoring a goal apiece 2:16 apart to give the visitors a 2-1 lead.
And it wasn’t surprising, necessarily, that the Lightning responded, tying it 2-2 on Kucherov’s nifty tip of a Jason Garrison point shot less than two minutes after Teravainen’s goal.
There was an uncharacteristically sloppy bit of goaltending central to the plot line. Tampa Bay’s Johnson snuck a short-side backhander past Crawford to give the home team a 3-2 lead late in the second period, and certainly Crawford should have had it covered.
“Just OK,” was Chicago coach Joel Quenneville’s post-game assessement of his netminder, borrowing from the Randy Carlyle phrasebook.
Seabrook tied it 3-3 a few minutes into the third period, teeing off on a drop pass from Toews. But Garrison’s power-play point shot, redirected en route by a Chicago stick and fooling Crawford, made it 4-3 midway through the final frame. The Lightning, facing heavy pressure with Chicago’s net empty and theirs manned by a rookie, held on. Exactly how firm their grip will be if Bishop is unable to play in Game 3 is anyone’s guess.