In Anaheim, Brandon Hagel s snapped a 2-2 tie with the Ducks to help the Tampa Bay Lightning to a 4-2 win on Wednesday night.
“This is a tough league to win in, and I don’t care who you’re playing against,” Tampa Bay coach Jon Cooper said. “You’re going on the road, a couple time zones away, you’ve got to grind out points.”
Brian Elliott made 19 saves in the Lightning win.
Troy Terry and Trevor Zegras were the Ducks strikers.
“It’s more frustrating now than the last couple [losses] because I think that game could have gone either way,” Terry said.
Mikhail Sergachev and Nikita Kucherov s scored in the first period after Zegras had given the Ducks a 1-0 lead in the first period.
“That’s an elite team,” Anaheim coach Dallas Eakins said. “They’re multiple champions for a reason and they don’t need you to make five mistakes to score at all. They just need you to make one.”
Nicholas Paul added an empty-net goal late, for the 4-2 final.
“The game’s in the balance, it’s tied in the third period,” Cooper said. “You have to find a way to get points out of it, and we did, so we’ll take it.”
John Gibson made 26 saves in the Ducks loss, their sixth straight.
“I thought we stayed resilient through the game,” Eakins said. “When we got down, I didn’t see a whole lot of heads dragging on the bench waiting for the next one to come. Guys were up on the bench. They stuck together through it. I thought we were fairly good in our own zone again. I still think we can play just a much more efficient game with the puck. We still tend to complicate things through the neutral zone.”
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