Thursday, 4 a.m.
Turns out, there is some power to the play of the Tampa Bay Lightning.
The Bolts, who had been struggling on the power play (and, yes, on their offensive attack), flexed their muscles Wednesday night in a rare playoff route, bashing the Boston Bruins 7-1 to take a 2-1 series lead.
The Bolts scored the game's first three goals, and it's last four. Three of the goals came on the power play, a unit that had failed to score on its previous 16 attempts.
How big was the win? It was so big that the Bolts came away warning each other that it was just one game, after all, and not to get too cocky.
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“Let's be honest," said Lightning coach Jon Cooper.
This is an aberration. It doesn’t happen in playoff hockey. They're the President's Trophy champions. You turn the page on this one, just like you turn the page on an overtime thriller. You can’t hang your hat on that one. When a team has a klunker, you can’t hang your hat on that one, either. They're just one-gamers."
Still, it was nice to win games on back-to-back days to go up in the series.
The Bolts swapped sides of the power play with Nikita Kucherov (who had a career-high four playoff points with a goal and three assists) and Ondrej Palat (who scored a goal). But Cooper seemed to think the success was cyclical.
“At some point, they have to break out, right?" Cooper said. "Like, the Boston Bruins have a vote, too. They’re trying to stop us. We have to adjust, and tonight, it worked out. To be honest, the power play. the last one we had last night — even though we didn’t score — I thought it was huge momentum boost for our team. It was just a carryover into today. At some point, they were bound to go in. Tonight they came in bunches."
For the Bolts, Alex Killorn scored two goals. Brayden Point, Yanni Gource and Mikhail Sergachev all scored.
“I think in these games, when you get up six goals, the type of hockey that’s being played is not the type of hockey that will be played Friday," Killorn said. "You don’t want to pick up any bad habits. We have to switch gears and get back to thew ay we were playing at the begining of the game."
The Bolts can take a huge 3-1 lead on Friday night (7:30 p.m.) when the teams play again.