The Tampa Bay Lightning will try to build off a wild win when they finish a five-game road trip Saturday against the struggling Calgary Flames.
Thanks to a five-goal third period, led by Steven Stamkos’ first career four-goal game, the Lightning arrive in Calgary on the heels of a 7-4 victory over the Edmonton Oilers on Thursday.
“He looks at me after the fourth one and says, ‘First time ever,’ ” Lightning coach Jon Cooper said. “I was like, ‘You’ve got 500 of them, that was the first time you’ve had four in a game?’ And he said, ‘Yeah,’ so we had a good little chuckle on the bench.
“You need your big guys to come out when the game’s on the line, and ‘Vasy’ (goaltender Andrei Vasilevskiy) and ‘Stammer’ (Stamkos) did that.”
With two wins in four games so far, the trip has been a microcosm of the Lightning’s season. Tampa Bay has claimed four of six games, but that followed a four-game skid.
The perennial league power remains outside a playoff position, even with the league’s leading scorer, Nikita Kucherov — who became the first player to hit 50 points this season with his one-goal, two-assist outing in Edmonton.
As much as the Lightning had reason to celebrate the Oilers game, they cannot fool themselves. Vasilevskiy delivered a sparkling 53-save performance.
“Without him, that’s not even a game, so I think we give all the credit to ‘Vasy’,” Stamkos said. “Certainly not a recipe we want to have to rely on every night, but in a game like that when we don’t have our best and we’re playing a really good team that’s on a winning streak, to have him back there was obviously huge.”
The Flames return home after going winless in four games, with the latest disappointment a 3-2 shootout loss to the Minnesota Wild on Thursday.
The Flames are on a 1-4-2 skid in which they have been close in almost every one of those defeats but not able to drum up a victory.
“I thought we were the better team and we deserved those two points,” goalie Dan Vladar said. “The shootout is like a lottery, right? They’ve got a bunch of skilled guys and it is what it is. For me, I’ve got to stay with it and keep doing the same things and, hopefully, the results are going to come.”
As close as the Flames have been to winning in those games, they have been their own worst enemy. On top of allowing a goal in the first five minutes in 11 games already this season, they have trailed at one point in 15 consecutive games and 25 of 26 outings.
During their road trip, which started with a 6-5 loss to the Central Division-leading Colorado Avalanche and was followed by a 5-4 overtime loss to the league-leading Vegas Golden Knights, Calgary erased deficits but blew third-period leads in all three games.
“It’s happened too much where we’ve scored and then given one up in 30-40 seconds. It takes the air out of the tires,” forward Blake Coleman said. “We’ve got to find ways to have good follow-up shifts.”
“It’s another lead that we felt like we should have come out of here with two points,” he added.
–Field Level Media