SUNRISE, Fla. (AP) — The Tampa Bay Lightning were in an early hole against the Florida Panthers, again.
In the first two games of their first-round playoff series, that spelled disaster for Tampa Bay.
Not this time.
The Lightning turned the deficit into a rout in Game 3, beating the Panthers 5-1 Saturday and tightening the series to 2-1.
Andrei Vasilevskiy was nearly perfect, stopping 33 of 34 shots, and the Lightning got goals from Jake Guentzel, Brayden Point, Nick Paul and Luke Glendening. Anthony Cirelli added an empty-netter with five minutes left, and Nikita Kucherov had three assists.
“To be honest, you would have never known sitting in the locker room after Game 2 that we were down 0-2,” Lightning coach Jon Cooper said. “It wasn’t going to guarantee the result, but I knew (darn) well how the effort was going to be.”
The Lightning will try to even things up in Game 4 on Monday at Sunrise. The defending Stanley Cup champion Panthers, however, are 5-0 after taking a 2-0 lead in a playoff series.
Paul gave the Lightning their first lead of the series when he slipped a shot just inside the pad of Panthers goalie Sergei Bobrovsky in the second period. Guentzel made it a two-goal lead just 21 seconds into the third before the Lightning pulled away with Glendening and Cirelli’s goals later in the period.
Matthew Tkachuk scored for the Panthers, his third goal of the series. Bobrovsky finished with 17 saves.
“We’ve got lots of room to get better. I’m sure they do, too,” Panthers coach Paul Maurice said, “so I’m not feeling today like there’s an aberration to how I thought this would go. This was going to be a grinder straight through.”
Tkachuk, who scored twice in the opener, got on the board 2:43 into the game when he tapped a feed from Sam Bennett past Vasilevskiy for his 20th playoff goal with the Panthers. The Lightning responded when Guentzel’s shot bounced off Point and past Bobrovsky later in the first to give the NHL’s highest-scoring team in the regular season its first goal in nearly five periods.
Vasilevskiy had given up seven goals in the first two games but was huge on Saturday. He bounced back from Tkachuk’s quick goal and withstood a flurry of Florida shots in the second and third. The Panthers had 71 total shot attempts.
“I think it’s a huge win for our team. It gives us some confidence and some life in the series,” Guentzel said. “To go on the road, sometimes it brings everyone together. … It’s only one game. We’ve got to move on to the next one and be ready to go.”
The Lightning were playing without forward Brandon Hagel, who was suspended for the game after a hard hit on Aleksander Barkov that knocked the Florida captain out of the final 10 minutes of Game 3. Barkov played on Saturday, along with Panthers defenseman Aaron Ekblad, who returned from a 20-game suspension for violating the NHL and NHL Players’ Association’s policy on performance-enhancing drugs.
“I feel good. That’s why I was out there,” Barkov said.
Things got more physical as the game went on, and Tkachuk was assessed a five-minute major for a late hit on Guentzel before Tampa’s empty-netter.
When asked his thoughts on Tkachuk’s hit given Hagel’s suspension, Cooper shrugged.
“The only players we hit,” he said, “are the ones with pucks.”
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AP NHL: https://apnews.com/hub/NHL
Alanis Thames, The Associated Press
