In Newark, the New Jersey Devils’ Timo Meier scored his second goal of the game i the third period to to tie the Tampa Bay Lightning, 3-3, on Thursday, and force extra time.
The extra session solved nothing, and Alex Killorn was credited with the deciding goal on penalties for a 4-3 win to Tampa.
“The Devils are going to be a 50-win team in this league, and for us to come into their building and take two, we needed a lot of things to go our way,” Tampa Bay coach Jon Cooper said. “Our penalty killing, goaltending, timely goals, but that’s what happens when you win games.
“We now have to build off what we’ve done here and continue this when we get back home.”
Andrei Vasilevskiy made 32 saves in the Tampa win.
The Lightning improved to 41-22-6 off their fourth win in six games.
“They’re a good team; we saw that [Tuesday],” Meier said. “They took advantage of our mistakes. It was a tough game, but we stuck with it, we capitalized on some of our chances.”
Ross Colton gave the Lightning a 1-0 lead with 69 seconds gone in the first period.
New Jersey tied it, 1-1, nine minutes into the second period on a goal from Tomas Tatar.
Steven Stamkos scored his first of two on the night to give the Lightning a 2-1 lead at 18:11, just after killing off a 5-on-3 penalty.
“You want to be feeling as good as you can coming down the stretch, so I think it was probably the smart decision not to play the other night,” Stamkos said. “I felt 10 times better tonight than I did against [the] Winnipeg [Jets in a 3-2 loss on Sunday), so well worth it.”
New Jersey dropped to 44-17-7 on their second straight loss.
“Timo’s just trying to fit in and sometimes it takes 10 or 15 games to figure out what fits,” New Jersey coach Lindy Ruff said. “We know he’s a great shooter, so you got to get the puck on his stick. We got to get him in position to shoot.”
Stamkos’ second of the game came off the power play at 15:13 of the third for a 3-2 lead.
“When you don’t score on a 5-on-3 you usually don’t win the game, and very rarely do you see a full two minutes, so hats off to our penalty killers out there blocking shots, sacrificing bodies,” Stamkos said. “[Vasilevskiy] had some big saves and then we score coming out of the box, so we deserved that one. The guys fought hard on that 5-on-3 and got the job done.”
Akira Schmid made 20 saves in the New Jersey loss.
You must be logged in to post a comment.