The Backcheck: Tampa Bay win streak hits six games over back-to-back in California

The calendar flipped to 2026, and the win streak lives on for the Tampa Bay Lightning.

Tampa Bay ended 2025 by beating the Anaheim Ducks 4-3 in head coach Jon Cooper’s 1,000th NHL game on Wednesday night and then opened 2026 with a last minute, comeback 5-3 victory to push their win streak to six games against the Los Angeles Kings on Thursday.

Tampa Bay is now 24-13-3 this season and closes its three-game roadtrip with a visit to play the San Jose Sharks on Saturday at 4 p.m.

“There’s so many things to be proud of for this group,” Cooper said after Wednesday’s win. “We’ve come a long way from having one win in our first seven games. Pretty resilient group in there…There’s a lot of trust in that group, and they can play a bunch of different ways. In the end, they keep finding a way to sneak points out and most nights, win. I’m just proud of their effort and proud to be behind the bench with them.”

Lightning beat Ducks in Coach Cooper’s 1,000th game

The Lightning celebrated head coach Jon Cooper’s 1,000th game as Lightning head coach with a resilient 4-3 overtime win over the Anaheim Ducks on Wednesday night.

Tampa Bay held three separate one-goal leads, all of which were erased by the host Ducks before the Lightning got some overtime heroics from Brandon Hagel and defenseman Darren Raddysh to end 2025 with a victory.

Raddysh’s goal 2:47 into the overtime period stood as the winner when he poked home the puck after a feed from Hagel near the left wall. The assist was Hagel’s third of the night to lead all players in scoring.

“We knew it was going to be a fight like that,” Hagel said postgame. “It feels like every game is like that, comes down to basically the buzzer. It happened today, and we made the last play.”

After an earlier Lightning goal was negated due to a coach’s challenge for being offside, defenseman JJ Moser made sure to give the visitors a real 1-0 lead later in the first period.

Raddysh fed Moser a pass at the left faceoff circle, where Moser pulled the puck to change the angle of his shot around a sliding Ducks defender before slipping his shot through the glove of goalie Lukas Dostal to make it 1-0 with 6:30 left in the first period.

Moser’s goal was his 99th career NHL point and first since signing an eight-year contract extension with the Lightning last Saturday. Hagel, who was named to Team Canada’s 2026 Winter Olympics squad earlier in the day, earned the secondary assist on the play.

Anaheim tied the game with 4:43 remaining in the second period on a 2-on-1 chance following a Lightning turnover, but Brayden Point restored Tampa Bay’s advantage before the teams went to their respective locker rooms for the second intermission.

Point redirected defenseman Max Crozier’s shot pass from the point near the Anaheim net with 49 seconds remaining in the middle frame to make it 2-1, Point’s seventh goal of the season.

The Ducks forced another turnover early in the third period to knot the score 2-2.

Rookie Beckett Senecke skated out of the corner and ripped his shot top shelf 3:57 into the final period of regulation, and the teams then traded power-play goals from Nikita Kucherov and Mason McTavish later in the frame to force overtime.

In the extra period, Hagel drew a pair of Anaheim defenders to him near the left boards before deking around Troy Terry and feeding Raddysh for the tap-in goal at the net to win the game 4-3 with 2:23 remaining.

The goal was Raddysh’s ninth of the season, tying him for fifth among all NHL defensemen this season. He gave all the credit to Hagel postgame.

“He did all the work on the wall and drew two guys to him and found me backdoor,” Raddysh said of the play. “It was a great pass, great play by him and I was just fortunate to be there.”

Hagel’s three assists led all players, while Raddysh and Kucherov each finished the game with a goal and assist. Lightning goalie Andrei Vasilevskiy also earned an assist on the overtime goal on a night he made 25 stops to pick up his 15th win of the season.

Coach Cooper’s win was the 595th of his NHL career, all with Tampa Bay, giving him the second-most in NHL history through a coach’s first 1,000 games. The only coach ahead of him is Hockey Hall of Fame member Scotty Bowman (598 wins).

Cooper became the fifth coach in NHL history to reach 1,000 games with a single franchise.

“I can speak from a player’s perspective, not only do you come in this league and probably think about how you can stay in this league and how you can get better in this league, you probably don’t think about 1,000,” Hagel said of Cooper. “To reach 1,000 is an incredible milestone, and to be able to do it with one team is even more incredible, especially as a coach nowadays, they seemingly don’t have a long string. Coop’s done an incredible job.”

Benjamin’s Three Stars:

1. Brandon Hagel, TBL (3 assists)
2. Darren Raddysh, TBL (Goal, assist)
3. Nikita Kucherov, TBL (Goal, assist)

New Years Day fireworks result in sixth straight win

Fireworks were launched across Tampa overnight on Thursday to ring in 2026, and the Lightning then brought some spark of their own to Los Angeles to stun the Kings and push their win streak to six games with a 5-3 comeback victory.

Trailing 3-2 with just over three minutes remaining in the game, Tampa Bay scored three unanswered goals to shock the Kings and win in regulation.

Anthony Cirelli tied the game with 3:19 remaining by burying a loose, bouncing puck near the crease on his backhand, and Gage Goncalves then gave the Lightning their first lead since the first period moments later.

Cirelli chipped the puck to Goncalves in the neutral zone, and the latter carried the puck behind the Los Angeles net before tossing the puck off the leg of a Kings defender and into the net to make it 4-3 with 1:41 left in the game.

Kucherov added an empty-net goal to seal the 5-3 win.

“We’re sticking to our structure. We’ve found a little grove of the right way that we need to play in order to be a good team, a successful team,” Cirelli said of what worked for his team. "Obviously there were bits and spurts there that kind of got away from us, and (goalie Jonas Johansson) was huge tonight in making massive saves, especially that breakaway save there when it was 3-2. Just keep pushing. Just keep going next shift, have the next one and just keep battling.”

Tampa Bay utilized its first man advantage of the game and slick passing to snag the first lead on Thursday.

Jake Guentzel completed a give-and-go with Kucherov in the right side of the zone, receiving the puck in the slot before handing it to an open Point at the left goalpost. Point slipped home the game-opening goal just 3:34 into the game for his second tally in as many games.

Tampa Bay wasn’t able to rest on its early lead, however, as the Kings snagged two quick goals of their own to steal the advantage—defenseman Jeff Malott tied the game on a shot from the top of the zone 4:43 into the game after an errant Lightning pass in the defensive zone, and Andrei Kuzmenko made it 2-1 Los Angeles with a power play rebound goal 90 seconds later.

“Our PK has been pretty darn good this year, and they solved us,” Cooper said. "A little bit of our own doing, but I just thought if we kept going we had a chance. When the clock’s ticking down, though, you never know. But a couple big efforts by the guy to get a couple, and I thought we were knocking at the door, it was just, could we get through? And fortunately for us, tonight we did.”

The second period was played at a slower offensive pace, as the teams combined for eight total shots on goal. The Lightning restricted the Kings to a single shot on net in the middle frame.

Some puck luck and a drive to the net ended with Point’s second goal of the night, this one tying the game 2-2 with 1:53 remaining in the second period.

Point drove behind the Kings net, where Raddysh took control of the puck. Raddysh’s passing attempt hit Kings defenseman Mikey Anderson in the leg and rolled back to an open Point at the right post, who tucked home the tying goal on his backhand.

Lightning defenseman JJ Moser earned the secondary assist on the play for his 100th career NHL point.

“It just shows our resilience as a team, especially on the second night of a back-to-back,” Moser said of the comeback. “It takes a lot to just stay with it and trust it and keep going and believe that eventually one is going to fall in, and two fell in at the end. Very happy with that.”

Los Angeles restored its lead on its second power-play goal of the game, this one coming from the bottom of the left faceoff circle on a shot from Kevin Fiala following a cross-ice pass from Corey Perry. The goal came after a failed full-ice clearing attempt by the Lightning in the neutral zone.

Despite that power-play goal, Cirelli led the pushback for the visitors in the third. The soon-to-be Olympian was one of five Lightning players to finish with a multi-point game on a night Kucherov led the Lightning with his goal and two assists.

Johansson finished with 17 saves for his ninth win of the season, and Darcy Kuemper had 19 for the Kings. Perry led Los Angeles with three assists.

Cooper said it was a successful back-to-back, but the team has one more job to complete on this trip on Saturday.

“We’re on the West Coast, we’re a three-hour time zone change away. Here’s the thing, we just played a back-to-back and played a rested LA team. Those are grinds, and I thought our guys handled it unbelievably. I just don’t want us to sit here and rest that we were fortunate to take an overtime win and had to kind of come back late. It could’ve gone the other way, so I think we’ve been fortunate with the four points here, but one more in San Jose. That would be great to be able to go home and then play a tough Colorado team.”

Benjamin’s Three Stars:

1. Brayden Point, TBL (2 goals)
2. Corey Perry, LAK (3 assists)
3. Gage Goncalves, TBL (Game-winning goal)