It seems the 2021 NHL season is the year of the squandered three-goal lead.
Such was the case in Chicago on Sunday afternoon.
Philipp Kurashev, Mattias Janmark and Pius Suter scored for the Blackhawks on Sunday to give the club a 3-0 advantage over the Tampa Bay Lightning.
And then, nothing.
The Lightning responded with six unanswered goals in a 6-3 win.
“We’re down by three goals, we need to get things going,” Yanni Gourde (two goals) said. “Pretty obvious if we don’t turn the ship around at that point, we’re not going to win that game. We started working better, put a few shifts together, scored a few goals to give us momentum, and it kind of carried on.”
Andrei Vasilevskiy made 22 saves after settling down to get the win.
Just 40 seconds after the Hawks took the three-goal lead, the Lightning began their rally.
Ondrej Palat got the Bolts on the board, and Gourde got the Lightning within one 23 seconds after that.
“We’d love to have a little more killer instinct,” Blackhawks head coach Jeremy Colliton said. “We have them down 3-0 at home, you just don’t want to give them any life, any reason to believe. [A] quick power-play goal and then they score right away, it’s probably not what you want to do against the (defending Stanley) Cup winners.”
Victor Hedman tied the game 3-3.
“We came out obviously with a little bit more jump,” Tampa Bay head coach Jon Cooper said of the second period. “Now, it was helped by the fact that the power play was rolling. … When you go down 3-0, to be able to score pretty quick after that gave us a little bit of life, then we got that second one and you just see the confidence growing on us.”
Gourde made it 4-3 on the power play and Tampa was looking in the rear view mirror at what they had wrought.
The Lightning were 4-for-5 on the power play.
Alex Killorn and Pat Maroon(power play) extended the lead in the third period.
Chicago scored once in four chances with the extra skater.
Kevin Lankinen made 33 saves in the loss.
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