The Vancouver Canucks are the last-place team in the NHL, meaning this was a take-care-of-business game for the Lightning. They did take care of business, winning their second in a row on this four-game road trip.
The Canucks generated a couple of rush chances in the early minutes but didn’t convert. They came close, however. Jake DeBrusk’s shot from the slot hit the inside of the post and stayed out. As the first period progressed, the Lightning established control. After those first few shifts, they owned most of the possession during the first period. They got rewarded at 17:37 when Jake Guentzel tipped a shot from Charle-Edouard D’Astous past Kevin Lankinen.
The Lightning broke the game open early in the second. During the first minute of the frame, Lankinen lost his stick with the puck in the Vancouver end. The trio of J.J. Moser, Brandon Hagel, and Anthony Cirelli successfully battled to win a loose puck in the corner. Eventually, Cirelli set up Nikita Kucherov at the right circle, and Kucherov fed Darren Raddysh at the right point. Raddysh smartly fired the puck on Lankinen’s stick side. Lankinen still didn’t have a stick in his hand when the shot got past him at :49.
Two more long-range Lightning shots went in the Vancouver net before the first TV timeout of the second period. Yanni Gourde deflected another Raddysh shot at 4:16. Just 1:15 later, Kucherov’s shot banked into the net off Filip Hronek. The Lightning tallied those three second-period goals in a span of 4:42.
The Lightning held Vancouver to just four SOG in the period, but the Canucks did get on the board at 12:06 when Liam Ohgren converted off the rush with a shot from the slot.
In the third period, a couple of fumbled pucks by the Lightning in the defensive zone on successive shifts created Grade-A chances for Vancouver. Andrei Vasilevskiy stopped DeBrusk after the first turnover, but the second one was costly. After Vasilevskiy denied Marco Rossi’s point-blank shot, Linus Karlsson batted in the rebound at 7:04. Suddenly, the game was 4-2.
The Lightning had a response, answering on the next shift. Hagel wired a pass to Cirelli at the top of the crease, and Cirelli redirected it past Lankinen at 7:36. When Hagel scored off the rush at 10:35, the Lightning had re-established their four-goal lead and effectively removed any remaining doubt about the outcome.
The Lightning played the final 40 minutes with only five defensemen after Victor Hedman left after the first period. Jon Cooper said during his postgame interview that Hedman wasn’t feeling well (an illness-related absence).
One game after tallying 12 points as a line, the Cirelli unit added eight more in this game. Kucherov recorded three of those and moved to within a single point of Connor McDavid for the league lead. (They face each other in a head-to-head matchup on Saturday in Edmonton.) Just as important, the Lightning played well enough to ensure that they left Vancouver with two additional standings points in the bank.
My Three Stars of the Game:
- Nikita Kucherov — Lightning. Goal and two assists.
- Anthony Cirelli — Lightning. Goal and two assists.
- Darren Raddysh — Lightning. Goal and assist.
