Lightning comes from behind to beat Calgary

by Gary Shelton on February 2, 2018 · 0 comments

in general, Tampa Bay Lightning

Killorn had four points for the Bolts./ANDREW KRAMER

Killorn had four points for the Bolts./JEFFREY S. KING

Saturday, 2 a.m.

Alex Killorn might have thought he had problems. After all, it had been a long time since he found the net.

Big deal. Talk to Corey Conacher. It had been a long time since he even found the ice.

That was before Thursday night, when both players had season-bests with a pair of goals each in a 7-4 comeback victory over the Calgary Flames.

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Vasilevskiy stopped 42 shots for Tampa Bay./JEFFREY S. KING

Vasilevskiy stopped 42 shots for Tampa Bay./JEFFREY S. KING

The Flames led 4-2 late in the second period, but the Lightning then broke loose with five straight goals.Besides Killorn and Conacher, the Lightning got goals from Braydon Coburn, Matthew Peca and Steven Stamkos. It was Stamkos' 19th goal of the year.

Peca scored with 1:36 to go in the second period, and then Killorn tied the game 12 seconds into the third period.

“We’ve been on both sides of this," Lightning coach Jon Cooper said. "You give up one late in the period and then start the other period and it’s a huge momentum swing. It goes 4-2 to 4-4. We got a little bit bigger on the bench. You could just see our confidence growing. And then we were slinging everything at the net, and, fortunately for us, they were going in.

"It’s funny though, a game like that, you score four in the third and you’re borderline disappointed how the period went because we ended up giving up 19 shots and a plethora of scoring chances and it was all after we went up 7-4. That’s where we’ve got to be better. We have to close this game down instead of invite our goaltender into a shooting barrage. That was the only disappointment in this. But in saying that, you’ve just got to win games, you’ve got to keep munching points. That’s all we want to do. I’ll take a lot of good out of this. But as I said, we’ve just got to tighten up a little bit, especially when we get the lead.”

For the Lightning, goaltender Andrei Vasilevskiy stopped 42 shots and earned his 30th victory of the year.

Cooper was happy to see Killorn score twice.

“We just went over some video with him of how he was scoring his goals and having a little bit of a shot mentality first, instinctually just throwing pucks at the net," Cooper said. "I honestly thought, early in the game that line was really engaged but you know how it is, they get one and all of a sudden it’s like the balloon pops and now they’ve got the vibes going. I felt that was the same thing for Conacher too. He’s been out of the lineup a little bit, guys that are used to scoring they get one, then all of a sudden they can get another one. So hopefully that translates to a few more.”

Said Killorn: “It’s been one of those things where the puck hasn’t really been falling my way for a lot of the season, so to have a game like this, it’s great, get my confidence back.”

Conacher said the Peca goal was huge.

"That line was big for us all night," Conacher said. "They even set the tone at the start of the third period, they got that goal right on the first shift. We kind of built off that, scored a couple more right away and luckily we got that lead because they put some pretty good pressure on us at the end of the game. Vasy played a great game tonight.”

The Bolts now travel to Vancouver to play a Saturday game against the Canucks. The puck is scheduled to drop at 10 p.m.

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