Three minutes of really mediocre hockey spoiled a perfectly decent night for the Blackhawks on home ice, Thursday night.
Chicago held a 2-0 lead going into the third period.
The Tampa Bay Lightning’s Anthony Cirelli and Steve Stamkos scored in the first 2:55 of the third period to tie the game up, 2-2.
That’s where it stayed until Alex Killorn won it for the Bolts with 0.1 seconds left in the extra session for a 3-2 win. The game-winner came off a tip-in of a shot from Victor Hedman.
“I didn’t really want to take it on my backhand, so I turned around and I just heard from the bench, ‘Shoot the puck.’ There wasn’t a whole lot of time left,” Hedman said. “[Killorn] did a good job in front and the puck went in, so big goal and yeah it was obviously very last second.”
Ryan Carpenter and Alex DeBrincat spoiled Andrei Vasilevskiy‘s three-game shutout streak in the middle frame.
Vasilevskiy had gone 228 minutes without giving up a goal.
“[Vasilevskiy] is a big part of our team and you know sometimes, not too often, you have to rely on him to keep us in games when we’re not at our best,” Hedman said. “He’s been tremendous the whole season.”
Tampa improved to 13-7-4.
“The expectations are so high for this team,” Stamkos said. “Even when we are winning, sometimes you tend to nitpick a little bit and try to find some things we want to improve, which is not a bad thing.
“We’re certainly accustomed to winning here and we want to win every night, but we’ve let it slide here a little bit I’d say the past five periods before this third period here where we were relying on maybe special teams or our goalie a little too much to win some hockey games.”
Kevin Lankinen made 31 saves in the hard luck loss.
“It’s frustrating, for sure,” Lankinen said. “I think we played a really good game as a team. We showed we can play well against top teams in this league. We had one of our best games in a while here. I think we were close. Obviously tough bounce at the end. It’s frustrating.”
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