Another game at home. Another hole to dig out of.
The Tampa Bay Lightning, once again, found themselves behind two goals in a 4-3 shootout loss to Boston Thursday night. In five home games, the Bolts have fallen behind 2-0 in four of them. This time, Boston’s Jimmy Hayes scored the winning goal in the 10th round of the shootout.
“Clearly it’s troublesome,” said Lightning coach Jon Cooper. “You don’t want to give the guys a free pass, but you come off a 12-day road trip, ask any team that comes in and has their first home game back. They were on us. There was no doubt they were on us. They went up 2-0, one squeaks by our goaltender that we’d potentially like to have back and another one was offside.
“We fell down, but I didn’t think we should’ve been down 2-0. I thought the guys, when they got their legs and everything under them, I thought they played well enough to win the game.
“Our goalie gave us a chance to win and you know how it is when you get to the shootout. Flip a coin and when you start getting 10 guys deep, goalies did their job. Somebody’s got to put it in and unfortunately for us their guy did.”
The Lightning’s Tyler Johnson scored two goals. Victor Hedman scored the third goal. In the shootout, Braydon Point scored the only goal for the Bolts.
Brandon Carlo, Ryan Spooner and David Pasternak scored in regulation for the Bruins, who finished a 3-1 road trip.
“For us, we just got to find a way to jump up and have a better start than we had today,” Hedman said. “And, we like the way we battled back obviously, but we got to have a better start on Saturday against New Jersey that’s for sure. We just have to prepare the right way and make sure we get two [points] on Saturday.”
The Lightning is 6-4-1 on the season.
Tampa Bay plays New Jersey Saturday night.
