In Tampa,Darren Raddysh hit for the game-winner at 1:52 of extra time on Thursday to give the Lightning a 4-3 win over the visiting New Jersey Devils.
“Just get open, [Nikita Kucherov] is going to find you eventually,” Raddysh said. “We’re chasing these guys in the standings, and any extra point we can get is big.”
Andrei Vasilevskiy made 27 saves in the win.
The Lightning moved to 21-17-5.
“We know where we are and what we have to do,” Tampa Bay coach Jon Cooper said. “We don’t have a ton of wiggle room and we had a chance to get points like we did tonight. This is probably a game that maybe earlier in the year we don’t win … something doesn’t go our way, or we lose it in overtime. Now, we’re finding ways. That’s big for our group.”
New Jersey took a 1-0 lead at 7:02 of the opening stanza on a marker from Dawson Mercer.
Tampa tied it with Luke Glendening‘s first of a double at 12″35 of the first for a 1-1 score.
Glendening potted his double at 18:22 of the first with a shorthanded strike.
“I thought we grinded tonight,” Glendening said. “We weren’t great, but we stuck with it and got the two points in the end. We’ve put ourselves in this spot and we’ve got to dig our way out a little bit.”
New Jersey dropped to 21-15-3 off their second straight loss.
“I thought we played a heck of a game,” Devils coach Lindy Ruff said. “Young [defense] struggled in the first period and after that I thought we moved the puck well and created a lot of opportunities. I really felt like we did a lot of good things in the game. We really skated well.”
Brayden Point pushed the lead out to 3-1 midway through the middle frame.
New Jersey’s Jesper Bratt cut trimmed the deficit to 3-2 at 16:54 of the second off a tip in.
“We played a solid game all the way through,” Bratt said. “All four lines really came to work. It [stinks] not to get those two points, but in our division the one point is huge.”
Nathan Bastian forced the extra session when he tied the game, 3-3, at 3:53 of the third period off a breakaway.
“It was nice to get one, they have been hard to come by for me,” said Bastian, who played his 200th NHL game. “I think we had a lot of guys that stepped up tonight. We’ve proven in the past, we’ve proven on the road that regardless of who’s in the lineup we’ve built a culture where we know how we have to play.”
Vitek Vanecek made 16 saves in the loss.
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