DENVER | Jon Cooper took the right temperature of this first meeting of the final between the Lightning and the Avalanche.
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“The good team won that game,” Cooper said. We have better hockey in us. I would say we didn’t play our hockey by almost a kilometer against the Avalanche. But despite that, we were one shot away from winning.”
The Avalanche won 4-3 in overtime after a goal by Andre Burakovsky in that first battle against the Lightning.
In terms of shots on goal, however, there was a bigger gap. The locals dominated 38 to 23.
Andrei Vasilevskiy got off to a slow start allowing three goals on 15 shots in the first period. Vasilevskiy didn’t look good on Valeri Nichushkin’s goal and he miscontrolled Mikko Rantanen’s shot on the game’s first goal, Gabriel Landeskog’s.
As a good captain, Steven Stamkos dismissed the theory of a bad start for his star goalkeeper.
“Vasilevskiy didn’t have a bad start,” he said. They had tons of chances, we took penalties and he stood up, he gave us a chance to win.
Nothing new
The Lightning will find themselves on familiar ground with a one-to-zero deficit in this final. In the first round of the playoffs, Steven Stamkos’ band suffered a 5-0 loss against the Maple Leafs in the first game. In the Eastern Finals, the Lightning escaped the first two games at Madison Square Garden against the Rangers with 6-2, 3-2 losses.
“Every time you lose a first game, you don’t feel good,” Cooper said. We dug ourselves a hole early in the game. However, I liked some parts. We have housework to do.”
“We have a lot of confidence in the locker room,” added winger Patrick Maroon. I took a shitty penalty (at the end of the third period). I’m a veteran, I can’t make a game like this. But our numerical inferiority elapsed the penalty. We came back. We were a few inches from winning with a deflection from Stamkos.