In St Paul, following a scoreless opening stanza, Darren Raddysh hit for a double to stake the visiting Tampa Bay Lightning to a 2-0 lead over the Wild on Thursday night, in a 4-1 win.
“We’ve been kind of struggling to get goals on the back end, and to get two tonight, that was awesome,” Raddysh said. “But you know, we just got to make sure we build off that.”
Andrei Vasilevskiy made 22 saves in the win.
Tampa Bay moved to 19-16-5.
“Yeah, we got to generate a little bit more offense, especially from the back end,” Lightning coach Jon Cooper said. “And that was in our game plan today, and it worked out well for us.”
Raddysh scored at 4:31 of the middle frame to give the Lightning a 1-0 lead, his goal, at 7:00, made it 2-0.
“I just kind of saw [Conor Sheary] had the puck and just tried to beat my man to the net, and the goalie kind of came out high, so I just tried to throw a little fake, and then I knew once I faked there the wraparound was probably there,” Raddysh said. “Lucky to get that in and pot two tonight.”
Victor Hedman pushed the lead to 3-0 off a power play marker with two minutes gone in the third.
The Wild dropped to 16-17-4 off their fourth straight loss.
“I thought tonight we had some looks, but I thought our execution tonight didn’t allow us to play fast, and I thought in particular it was more the second pass out of the zone. We had a lot of pucks in skates, missed passes, bobbled pucks,” Wild coach John Hynes said. “That’s really when you can beat that initial part of the forecheck, and then basically on top of the circles to the red line, our execution in those areas really lacked, and that didn’t allow us to be able to get up and play as fast as we wanted to play and play a more attacking game.”
Zach Bogosian scored at 15:35 of the third to trim the deficit to 3-1.
“Yeah, that’s tough, giving up three goals to a team like that,” Bogosian said. “They’re obviously a good veteran team that is good at controlling leads. For what it is, I thought we competed. I thought we worked and tried to do the right things. We’ve just got to stay connected and make sure that we get a good solid road game [at the Columbus Blue Jackets on Saturday]. The only thing we can do is push forward.”
With 41 seconds left on the game clock, Brandon Hagel hit an empty net for the 4-1 final count.
Marc-Andre Fleury made 26 saves in the loss.
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