In Vancouver, the Canucks’ Brock Boeser hit for a natural hat trick on Tuesday to lift the Canucks to a 4-1 win over the visiting Tampa Bay Lightning on Tuesday night.
For Boeser, it eas his fifth career NHL hat trick.
“He’s just a smart guy, he knows the spots to go, and he’s sharpened up his defensive game,” Vancouver coach Rock Tocchet said. “He knows he still wants to get better at his defensive game but it’s night and day from last year, his positional hockey.”
He now has 21 goals on the season.
Thatcher Demko made 28 saves in the win.
The Canucks improved to 19-9-1 off their third straight win.
Brayden Point was the lone striker for the Lightning, his goal came with 85 seconds gone in the opening stanza for a 1-0 lead to Tampa.
“He made some great saves,” Point said. “I thought we did have some good looks. You get one there and you get a little life, but they beat us on the special teams tonight and it’s a big part of the game.”
The Lightning dropped to 13-12-5.
“We had some looks and we had we had enough scoring chances to get more than one goal, but we didn’t,” Tampa Bay coach Jon Cooper said. “It’s tough in this league at times. They kind of shut it down, the goalie was dialed in and we kept pushing.”
Andrei Kuzmenko scored off the power play at 6:08 of the first to tie the game, 1-1.
“We’ve got some looks recently but haven’t scored [on the power play],” Boeser said. “We talked it out, worked on it this morning in practice and I’m really happy he got that goal.”
Boeser then scored a double in the middle frame to give the Canucks a 3-1 lead headed to the third.
His first came midway through the second for a 2-1 advantage to Vancouver.
“I was just kind of skating the ice and saw most guys watching Quinn (Hughes) , he’s a hard guy not to. We do the same with [Nikita Kucherov] when he gets the puck,” Boeser said. “You kind of naturally just start looking at him and don’t scan the ice for guys. I thought the high ice was open for a one-timer and it worked out well.”
Boeser’s double at 16:52 pushed the lead to 3-1.
“When we lose the special team war in games, that’s tough for us because at times this year, we’ve fought it a little bit at scoring 5-on-5,” Cooper said.
Boeser picked up the hat trick goal at 18:72 of the third with an empty-net marker for the 4-1 final count.
Andrei Vasilevskiy made 18 saves in the loss.
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