Lightning ousted in opening round after another overtime loss to Leafs

TAMPA — The Lightning played in the final game of the NHL season each of the past three years. This season, the end was much earlier and unceremonious.

Ten months ago, the Lightning fought back tears as they watched the Avalanche parade around Amalie Arena hoisting the Stanley Cup. The previous two postseasons, they had that honor as they designed their own map for reaching the mountaintop.

This season, three overtime losses at Amalie Arena — where they had the league’s second-best home record during the regular season — ultimately sealed their fate. They made an untimely first-round playoff exit with the last of those overtime losses, 2-1 to the Maple Leafs in Game 6 of their series Saturday night on home ice.

“It’s a very, very kind of lonely feeling right now when you’re out this early,” Lightning captain Steven Stamkos said. “With the experience that we have, the players that we have, the expectation is to make a run every year. That’s the way it is when you have the run that we’ve had; the bar gets raised. So when you don’t get there, it’s tough.”

The Lightning rallied from being a goal down entering the third period, getting the tying goal from Stamkos 4:11 into the period. The night seemed to mirror Game 6 against the Maple Leafs in last postseason’s first-round series between the teams, a game that ended with Brayden Point’s goal in overtime to force Game 7.

This year, Maple Leafs captain John Tavares, a Toronto kid, snapped Toronto’s 18-season drought without a playoff series win. He skated around the back of the Lightning net and snapped a shot from the left circle into net-front traffic. The puck went off Lightning defenseman Darren Raddysh’s skate and past goaltender Andrei Vasilevskiy 4:36 into overtime.

The loss was the Lightning’s 10th in their last 11 overtime playoff games.

“Do I sit here and think we could have really done anything different to change the tide? No,” Lightning coach Jon Cooper said. “We played well enough to win this series. I think anybody that watched this series would agree with that. But you can’t lose three overtime games at home.”

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Inside the Tampa Bay locker room, it felt like a reckoning. Forward Alex Killorn, at age 33 a career-long Lightning player who can be a free agent in the offseason, sat at his stall in silence. Fourth-line center Pierre-Edouard Bellemare, a 38-year-old pending free agent, hunched over in his stall with his head in his hands.

Forward Mikey Eyssimont, who had the Lightning’s best scoring opportunity in overtime but was stopped by Maple Leafs goaltender Ilya Samsonov on a partial breakaway, looked ahead blankly at his stall.

The Lightning had plenty of opportunities before Eyssimont’s chance, and blown third-period leads in Games 3 and 4 at home haunted them, creating a hole even the most determined of teams would struggle to emerge from.

“I thought it was a series of just missed opportunities for our group, three overtime losses at home in games where I thought we were the better team,” Stamkos said. “We battled. We just let some games slip away and missed opportunities.

“We felt good about our game and our game plan, but you got to give (the Maple Leafs) credit, too. They battled. That’s what good teams do at this time of year. You might not always deserve to win, but you grind and you find a way, and they’ve got some really good players over there.”

Stamkos said he felt the Lightning played better in this series than they did in last year’s first-round meeting, which Tampa Bay won in seven games. And the Lightning dictated play throughout most of this series, including in all three home games. But they allowed a tying goal in the final minute of regulation in Game 3 and lost in overtime, and blew a 4-1 lead in Game 4 and lost in overtime.

“Your three games in overtime, regardless of how you think the territory of the game’s going, if you can’t pull those out, then it’s tough to win, and that’s where I give Toronto credit,” Cooper said. “Even when they were being leaned on by us, they were opportunistic, they capitalized on plays they had to win. When it came for our turn for that to happen, we couldn’t capitalize.”

The Lightning were arguably the better team in 5-on-5 play throughout the series, but the top line of Stamkos, Brayden Point and Nikita Kucherov scored just one goal 5-on-5, and Stamkos’ third-period goal Saturday came only after Cooper tweaked his lines, switching Stamkos with Brandon Hagel. In the series, the Lightning’s power play was 1-for-13 after Game 1.

At one point in the second period of Game 6, the Lightning’s top two lines had a 24-2 advantage in shot attempts but no goals to show for it. In the third period, the Lightning outshot the Maple Leafs 11-4. They dominated the pace in the early minutes of overtime before Tavares’ goal prompted a celebration of Toronto players on the ice and of fans in Maple Leaf Square.

“You really don’t know how to feel,” Lightning defenseman Victor Hedman said. “It’s an empty feeling. We love to play in these kind of games, and to come up short in the first round is never a good feeling. So, it will take a while to get over.”

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