On a night when the Lightning needed to simplify their game, they fell into a familiar trap, passing up shots on net for the extra pass.
And against a Stars team that doesn’t yield much in their own end, Dallas sat back, waited for the Lightning to make an errant pass and took advantage.
The Lightning went into Saturday night’s third period tied at 2, looking to extend their season-high five-game point streak. But when typically sure-handed defenseman Ryan McDonagh made a cross-ice pass that was picked off by Matt Duchene, Dallas capitalized.
Duchene’s steal sent the Stars on a 3-on-1 rush the other way, capped by Duchene rifling a tight-angled wrister below the right circle that beat Andrei Vasilevskiy high above his glove on the short side for a one-goal Dallas lead.
That’s all the Stars, a team with the best scoring defense in the league, would need. Roope Hintz split two Lightning skaters, creating a breakaway on the power play later in the period, and beat Vasilevskiy blocker side for an insurance goal in the 4-2 Dallas win.
“We have it in our hands and there’s 13-14 minutes left in a tie game,” Lightning coach Jon Cooper said. “It’s OK if we play boring hockey and go to overtime. It’s OK to take a point, see if we get the next one. But we’re playing a team that’s been to a couple conference finals the last two years, and that’s why they do it. They just wait around content with a tie game and see if the other team is willing to give them a break. We did tonight. They capitalized, then they come out with two points. We get none.”
Leaving points on the ice
One of the things that makes the Lightning who they are is their creativity with the puck, and they have the skill to pull off dazzling plays. But Dallas has allowed two or fewer goals in four of their last five games.
With just over 13 minutes left in regulation, Anthony Cirelli brought the puck out of the corner and passed to McDonagh, who tried to make a touch pass from the top of the right circle to Conor Geekie along the left circle. Instead, Duchene picked off the pass and was off to the races the other way. He passed to Tyler Seguin trailing through the slot, and Seguin gave it back to Duchene for the go-ahead goal.
“It was tight there, and it was a matter of who made the mistake and (can) take advantage of it,” McDonagh said. “Definitely a play I’d want back there. Probably should just put it towards the net and play high-percentage (hockey) instead of looking for one more pass. They made us pay and carried it through the rest of the game.”
“We can say we learned our lesson enough times this year, so we’ve got to start applying it and realize that we’re leaving points out there because of our arrogance there,” McDonagh added. “So got to stop it right now.”
Wins don’t need to be pretty
Back on Nov. 7, the Lightning failed to hold a one-goal lead heading into the third period against the Flyers, a game that ended in a 2-1 shootout loss at home. Afterward, Cooper said that his team had been overcomplicating an uncomplicated game. After Saturday’s loss, he expressed the same sentiment.
“It’s almost like the goals don’t count unless it makes the highlight reel,” Cooper said. “Like we haven’t quite figured out that if the puck just crosses the goal line in between the pipes, it counts. It doesn’t have to be an all-world play and so that for sure hurt us tonight.”
The Lightning scored two goals in the first period, both by Cirelli, by putting pucks on net and jumping on rebounds. But in the third, all it took was a brief hiccup on McDonagh’s bad pass to cost them the game.
“One team tried to make six passes and put the puck in the net, turned it over and the other team made two passes and threw it at the net,” Cooper said. “And so one team waited for another team to make the mistake, they did, and their team capitalized on and that was it. We blinked first and we lost.”
Unlike Saturday, the Lightning were able to net a point in that game against Philadelphia. It was an improvement from Thursday’s ugly 7-6 overtime loss in Columbus, and before that game, the Lightning played three of their best games in wins over Winnipeg, New Jersey and Pittsburgh.
“It’s hard to take a moral victory at this point,” McDonagh said. “We like to take pride in closing it out there in those situations, 2-2 in the third; that’s not the way we want to play.”
