The Lightning understood heading into Game 1 there was a delicate balance between playing with emotion and avoiding the kind of penalties that could swing a playoff game. In the end, special teams became the difference Sunday night.
Tampa Bay, the NHL’s most penalized team during the regular season, became its own worst enemy in a 4-3 overtime loss to the Canadiens. Montreal went 3-for-5 with the man advantage, with all three goals coming off the stick of Juraj Slafkovsky.
Josh Anderson opened the scoring at 13:24 of the first period to give Montreal a 1-0 lead. After winning a puck battle below the goal line, Alexandre Carrier sent a pass through the legs of Lightning forward Gage Goncalves to Anderson.
The Lightning answered in the second period, when Darren Raddysh tied the game 1-1 with a power-play goal at 12:15, firing a one-timer off a feed from Nikita Kucherov. Just 29 seconds later, Brandon Hagel gave Tampa Bay a 2-1 lead.
Montreal responded before the intermission with Slafkovsky scoring a power-play goal at 19:36 to even the score at 2-2. He struck again in the third period, taking a pass from Cole Caufield and finishing to give the Canadiens a 3-2 lead.
Hagel tied the game for the Lightning, tapping in a pass from Jake Guentzel. The back-and-forth battle appeared headed for overtime at even strength, but with just 21 seconds left in regulation, Guentzel was whistled for a high-sticking penalty, sending Montreal to a power play.
© Morgan Tencza-Imagn Images“The chippiness is going to be there all series,” said Lightning defenseman Ryan McDonagh. “It’s the stick-penalty infractions and high-stick stuff, that’s what you've got to be accountable for. And they’re all penalties that the refs had to call. So, we’ve got to do a better job.”
Slafkovsky completed the hat trick just 1:22 into overtime, giving the Canadiens a 4-3 win.
“(Being down 1-0) is not a place you want to be, but at the same time you can look at this game and I think we shot ourselves in the foot,” said Hagel. “By taking an O-zone penalty, and you can go down the list, I don’t think any of those penalties we took prevented a goal. We just put goals in the back of our net.”
Lightning coach Jon Cooper showed his frustration after the game.
"I had a problem with us,” Cooper said. “We took four offensive-zone penalties. Just look at them. That's not overaggression; that was stupidity on a lot of them. That was on us.”
"That was a game that we just gave them an opportunity to win. This is the Stanley Cup playoffs. This is not Game No. 62. So, that was extremely disappointing in the way that we conducted ourselves and the amount of penalties that we took.”
The Lightning finished 2-for-5 on their own power play, but their penalty kill, which ranked third in the NHL during the regular season at 82.6 percent, was not able to pull through.
"If you're going to kill penalties off at 50%, you're probably not going to last that long,” said Cooper. “But if you're killing penalties off at 50% when you only give up two [penalties], so it's 1-for-2, maybe you can survive. You can't let that happen. That's on us. No excuses.”
Despite the loss, Cooper said the bigger issue wasn’t dropping Game 1, but how it all unfolded.
“That isn’t as much a concern as to how we lost it,” he said. “If that’s the way it’s going to keep going, then this series isn’t going to be as long as we thought.”
The Lightning are 0-7 in their past seven playoff overtime games. They’ll look to even the series in Game 2 on Tuesday at Benchmark International Arena.