Coming out of the All0Star break, the Lighting had been less than stellar, going 0-1-1, but on Thursday, Tampa got a 5-0 shutout of the Colorado Avalanche.
It was the first meeting between the teams since the Stanley Cup Final.
“It’s great. Hopefully they come in bunches,” Lightning coach Jon Cooper said. “He’s got a bunch of them (28), but it’s weird. Some years you get a ton of them, and some years they get broken up late. It’s happened to him a couple of times this year.”
Andrei Vasilevskiy made 30 saves for the shutout.
“I’m glad that we won. That’s the one thing that matters, not the shutout,” Vasilevskiy said. “As long as we have the win, I don’t care.”
Tampa improved to 33-16-2.
“I thought tonight we played very well, it’s obviously a matchup we circled at the beginning of the year,” Tampa’s ALex Killorn said. “For us now going on the road that was a huge game to get the momentum going the right way.”
Brandon Hagel hit for a double in the middle frame.
“We know our job is to shut guys down, slow them down a little bit,” Hagel said. “When we can score, it’s just a positive. It feels good. Everyone was working hard with ‘Tony’ beating two guys to the puck and getting the puck to me.”
He wrapped his two goals around a power play strike from Brayden Point in a three-goal second.
“The second power-play goal they got was kind of a backbreaker,” Avalanche coach Jared Bednar said. “And then our scoring chances kind of dried up from there.”
Colorado dropped to 27-19-4, they are 0-1-1 on a three-game roadie.
“I liked the start of the game. I thought both teams were playing hard,” Bednar said. “I felt like they were more competitive than us in certain areas of the game as the game went on.”
Corey Perry scored off the power play in the opening period for a 1-0 lead, and all the offense Vasilevskiy would need.
Mikhail Sergachev scored in the third period for the 5-0 final.
Alexandar Georgiev made 27 saves in the Avs loss.
“We’ve had two bad games. Offensively, we have to be better,” Colorado forward Mikko Rantanen said. “[We’re] not finishing. In the first period, we were playing good and creating enough chances to score. We had two power plays when it was 1-0. We’ve got to find a way to score.”
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