In Tampa, the Lightning finally got some scoring from the blue line on Tuesday night and defeated the New York Islanders in Game 2, 4-2.
Jan Rutta and Victor Hedman scored off the blue line for the Lightning in the third period for the first defensemen to score in the playoffs for the Tampa Bay.
“It was huge,” Hedman said. “The first game, no one mentioned that the defense didn’t score any goals, but you lose that game and all of a sudden it gets mentioned. We wanted to put an end to that tonight. What better way than top shelf by ‘Roots.’ We’re super happy obviously with the win, and we’re excited to go up to Long Island and keep it going.”
Rutta scored after an Islanders’ turnover was collected by Tampa and fed to the right point, the puck deflected off a New York defender for the goal.
Those two goals gave the Bolts a 4-1 lead.
Andrei Vasilevskiy made 24 saves in the win.
“It’s the timely saves that you need,” Tampa Bay head coach Jon Cooper said. “To be able to go into the break up a goal instead of tied, those are tough ones to give up at the end. But you need your guy back there to bail you out when you break down, and he sure did that.”
The series heads to Uniondale for Game 3, Thursday, and Game on Saturday.
Brayden Point opened the scoring in the first period to give Tampa a 1-0 lead.
“We’ve got good leadership in our room, and they keep our team from getting too high or too low,” Point said. ” … I don’t know, it’s tough to put a finger on it really. It’s gone good so far, but we can’t be happy with just this one. It’s going to be a hard, long series. We’ve got to look at the next one.”
Point’s goal came off a bad turnover below the goal line by the Isles and a nifty pass from Nikita Kucherov.
Brock Nelson scored off the power play at 13:30 of the first to tie the game. 1-1.
“We knew they were going to come with a good response after we got the first game,” Nelson said. “I thought we did a pretty good job coming out of the gates 1-1, but it’s hockey. Bounces, breaks, whatever it may be, they were able to get a couple and get the lead, and we weren’t able to get it back.”
Ondrej Palat scored at 13:15 of the middle frame to give the Bolts a 2-1 lead.
“Obviously, you guys know there was too many men on the ice,” Islanders head coach Barry Trotz said. “They had seven guys, so disappointed at that. But we tried to battle through that.”
The Lightning were 1-for5 with the extra skater, New York scored once in four chances.
“Tonight, we kept them at 20 percent, which is half the rate that they usually hit at, [but] yeah, we just can’t take that many (penalties),” Trotz said. “And they were taking some liberties tonight, [but] you know, it’s a long series.”
Hedman’s third period goal was off the power play.
“First and foremost, I’m really glad to see ‘Varly’ come back in the game,” Point said. “You don’t want to have collisions like that, and I certainly wasn’t trying to hurt anybody, so I was super happy to see he was all right and able to finish the game and came back. … It happens fast, so I can’t really blame anyone (for the penalty). I’m just glad everyone was all right because you don’t like to see collisions like that.”
Mathew Barzal scored with less than four minutes left in the third period to make the game a little more interesting in the final minutes.
Semyon Varlamov made 23 saves in the loss.
Varlamov left the game with less than seven minutes left in the first period after a collision with Point, he returned to the game at the start of the second period.
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