Matthew Tkachuk scored twice, including an empty-net goal to ice the game, as the visiting Florida Panthers beat the Tampa Bay Lightning 5-3 Thursday to take a commanding 3-0 lead in their best-of-seven Eastern Conference playoff series.
After Nicholas Paul cut the Lightning’s deficit to 4-3 with 5:10 remaining, they pulled goaltender Andrei Vasilevskiy with 1:45 left for the extra skater.
Tkachuk put the game away with an empty-netter with 32 seconds remaining for his third playoff goal as the Atlantic Division champions beat the Lightning for the fourth straight time in Tampa.
Florida’s Brandon Montour and Steven Lorentz each had a goal and an assist and Sam Reinhart also tallied. Goalie Sergei Bobrovsky made 26 saves for the Panthers, who are 5-1-0 against Tampa Bay this season.
Steven Stamkos and Tyler Motte hit the net for the Lightning, while Vasilevskiy stopped 26 shots.
In the first period, Florida’s penalty-kill unit, which clicked at 82.5 percent this season to rank sixth in the league, shut down both of its rival’s man advantages.
Florida used the momentum of the two successful kills to take a 1-0 lead when its second line — which produced Carter Verhaeghe’s Game 2-winning overtime goal — cashed in. A wide-open Tkachuk tallied from in close after a feed from Anton Lundell at 10:39.
Anthony Cirelli scored for Tampa Bay late in the period on its third power play, but Florida challenged that Brandon Hagel was offside on the entry. A quick review revealed that he was, and the score remained 1-0.
“We’ve had a couple of power-play goals in the series, but if you’re going to give us eight minutes (on four power plays), we’ve got to do something with it,” Lightning coach Jon Cooper said. “And we didn’t. In a one-goal game, that might’ve helped us out. … Ultimately, we did score a power-play goal, and we toe-picked at the blue line and it took us offside.
“Little things in the game like that just didn’t go our way. And that’s the tough part because that would’ve been the goal we needed and it didn’t count.”
In the second, the Lightning finally took their first lead of the series by scoring twice in a span of 2:12 — first on a deflection by Stamkos for his third playoff goal, then a high-slot wrister for Motte’s first. But Reinhart tied it 2-all with a shot from the right circle at 9:58, his second goal of the series.
Following a strong Florida push in the offensive zone, Montour fired a long shot that found its way through for his first goal and a 3-2 lead at 16:30.
Centering the fourth line, Lorentz, who scored once in 38 games in his first season with Florida, found a puck that bounced into the slot and rang his first career playoff goal off the post at 9:41 of the third for the two-goal lead.
“I mean, 2-1 versus 3-0 is a huge difference in the series, and we knew that coming in that they weren’t going to just sit back,” Lorentz said. “They were going to feed off their crowd.
“There were stretches throughout that game where we had some good pushes, but you could tell that they had some momentum going. Our mistakes weren’t super crucial. … We did a good job just wearing their (defense) down, and we’re happy with our performance.”
Paul brought it to 4-3 with his first goal as time was winding down, but Verhaeghe used his second assist to find Tkachuk to put Florida within a win of sweeping its rival.
Game 4 is scheduled for Saturday in Tampa.
–Field Level Media
