Wild play Lightning close but drop third straight to end road trip
Steven Stamkos' goal – on the night he was honored for previously reaching 500 career goals – was the difference-maker in the Minnesota Wild's 4-2 loss to the Lightning in Tampa Bay Tuesday night.
It officially goes down as Stamkos' 505th career goal and it came with 5:38 left in the third period. Making matters worse was a penalty on the Wild just 40 seconds after the go-ahead goal that put Tampa Bay on the power play and pushed Minnesota up agains the wall.
The Wild killed the power play but also erased two minutes of valuable game time.
Wild coach Dean Evason decided to pull goaltender Marc-Andre Fleury with 2:30 to play and it it nearly paid off a few times as Minnesota applied a ton of pressure in the offensive zone, but Nikita Kucherov grabbed a loose puck sent it into the vacant Minnesota net with 14 seconds remaining to seal the Tampa win.
The game was played tight start to finish, with no goals in the first period followed by the teams trading two goals each in the second frame. Joel Eriksson Ek's short-handed tally got the scoring started. Corey Perry then tied it 1-1 six minutes later, followed by Kirill Kaprizov scoring his 27th of the season to put Minnesota up 2-1.
Perry's second of the night tied the game 2-2 with 1:55 to left in the second and the game remained tied until Stamkos scored late in the third.
The loss is the third straight for Minnesota as they wrap up a four game road trip on the East Coast, having won in Washington, D.C. before consecutive losses at Carolina, Florida and Tampa Bay.
Minnesota gets a day to catch their breath before hosting the Philadelphia Flyers in St. Paul Thursday at 7 p.m.
