Avs hold off Tampa for 3-2 win

In Denver, Darcy Kuemper made 35 saves and held off the Tampa Bay Lightning for a 3-2 win for the Avalanche on Thursday night.

“[Tampa Bay] is definitely kind of a measuring stick for the rest of the League with the success they’ve had over the last couple of years,” Kuemper said. “I think as a team, this is a game where we want to be at our best.”

Brayden Point scored for the Lightning with just under five minutes left in the game to make the final minutes a bit more tense.

“I don’t think we’ve ever played any slower to start,” Tampa Bay head coach Jon Cooper said. “We really fed into their game and sure enough they’re up 2-0 and that was the difference. We’re way better than that. The last 50 minutes we were fine. We should have come out a little better than we did.”

The Lightning dropped to 30-11-6.

Devon Toews and Gabriel Landeskog had goals for the Avs.

“I felt like everybody was ready to go and we put 24 shots on them in the first period … just trying to feed off of that the whole game,” Landeskog said. “Even halfway through the second when they started pushing, I thought we did a pretty good job of keeping it to the outside and pushing back.”

Nikita Kucherov also scored for the Lightning.

“It was two good teams fighting for every inch out there,” the Lightning’s Ryan McDonagh said. “You feed a team and you give them momentum and they capitalize.

“It was close down the stretch there, but like I said, we don’t want to give ourselves a hole like that and force ourselves to climb back into it. Obviously ‘Vasy’ gave us a chance there weathering a storm in the first period.”

Valeri Nichushkin picked up, what proved to be the game-winner when he scored for a 3-1 Avs lead.

“I thought we did a great job of keeping the puck away from the front of our net, had a couple of big blocks,” Avalanche head coach Jared Bednar said. “I thought we did a really nice job of collapsing in there, making sure they had to shoot from the perimeter. Darcy makes a couple of saves, the guys did a nice job clearing the rebounds.”

Andrei Vasilevskiy made 44 saves in the Tampa loss.