Sometimes total dominance isn’t enough.
The Tampa Bay Lightning played a picture perfect road game last night in St. Louis, but they were unable to seal the deal on a victory. Thanks in large part to some phenomenal goaltending from Brian Elliott, the Bolts were simply stymied on their way to a 2-1 overtime loss.
While they did ultimately lose the game, Tampa did get on the board first on Tuesday night. Just 5:20 into the contest, Cedric Paquette followed up on an Alex Killorn rebound and potted his 11th goal of the season. The goal was his sixth in his last four games; to say that he’s been hot would be an understatement.
That was it. The Lightning’s ability to put the puck in the net vanished after that Paquette goal. No more goals. No more celebrations.
For a long while, it looked as though the Paquette marker would stand up as the winner. The Lightning continued to dominate the possession game through the second and third, while Ben Bishop made the saves he needed to make when tested.
That was until Vladimir Tarasenko broke Bishop’s shutout bid with only 3:10 left in regulation. After a Blues faceoff win, Tarasenko just ripped a mind-blowingly good wrist shot past Bishop. The goal was the young Russian’s 26th of the year, and more importantly the goal was enough to get the Blues into overtime.
Just 1:16 into the extra frame, Jaden Schwartz was able to dance around Victor Hedman and poke the puck past Bishop for the game-winning goal. It wasn’t Hedman’s finest moment, but he can hardly be blamed for the loss. If the Lightning play like they did on Tuesday in most games moving forward, they’ll win more often than they lose. Still, this one hurt.
Give the Blues credit for hanging around despite being outplayed, and give Brian Elliott credit for putting on an incredible performance in net. While it could be argued that the Blues skaters didn’t deserve the victory, the fact is that they scored more goals than the Lightning skaters. That’s all that matters. Being outshot 31-18 isn't a great recipe for consistent success, but the Blues made it work for them on Tuesday. The Lightning have to move on from this disappointing loss and get ready to face the resurgent Dallas Stars on Thursday.
My apologies for the brevity of this blog and the last few. I’m swamped with something non-blogging related until Thursday. After that it’ll be back to business.
As always, thanks for reading.
Michael Stuart has been the Tampa Bay Lightning writer for HockeyBuzz since 2012. Visit his archive to read more or follow him on Twitter.