It wasn’t the night the Tampa Bay Lightning hoped for in a must-win situation to keep their season alive Wednesday.
The Lightning opened the scoring for the first time in the series when Gage Goncalves scored 2:33 into the game. Florida answered quickly with a power-play goal from Carter Verhaeghe at 5:21, and Anton Lundell redirected a Brad Marchand pass at 10:06.
Nick Paul evened the scoring at 12:16 of the first period, netting his second goal of the series and giving Tampa Bay a brief surge of momentum. But it was Eetu Luostarinen who stole the spotlight for the Panthers, tallying a goal and adding three assists.
“We have a group in here that we really believe in, and that's not going to change going forward,” said Lightning captain Victor Hedman. “Good experience for the young guys who’ve never had the feeling of postseason hockey, so hopefully they can build on that throughout the summer. Three straight years we’ve been knocked out in the first round. So we’ll put a stop to that next year.”
This series showed that the Battle of Florida has evolved into one of the NHL's premier rivalries, but it's not going in the direction the Lightning would like.
“There's only a few teams in the last little while that really know how to do it,” said Lightning coach Jon Cooper. “We were one of them and now they're one of them. It's unfortunate we've had to run into them. Whether this series they swept us or it was 4-1 or 4-2...to me that's kind of irrelevant. They beat us. We're in a really tough division, we've had a rep in the Cup Final for the last five. It was our turn for a while, now it's theirs. Our job is to make sure it's our turn again.”
In each of the past five seasons, either the Tampa Bay Lightning or the Florida Panthers have represented the Eastern Conference in the Stanley Cup Final.