NEW YORK — Twenty-seven days ago the Tampa Bay Lightning were forced to win a game to extend their season. Two days later, they did it again.
Now the youngest team remaining in the Stanley Cup playoffs finds itself just one victory from a berth in the final.
Lessons, the Lightning have learned a few. They’ve also had captain Steven Stamkos turn into the goal-scoring beast he’s expected to be after failing to find the net until the second round.
“You can’t keep him down forever,” coach Jon Cooper said after Sunday’s stifling 2-0 win over the Rangers.
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This was a victory Tampa badly needed. A Game 7 at Madison Square Garden is going to be awfully tough to win, but now the Lightning have a chance on Tuesday to ensure the Eastern Conference final never gets that far.
Stamkos was the offensive catalyst, finding Valtteri Filppula on the rush for the opening goal before completing a tic-tac-toe tap-in five minutes later. He’s now got seven goals in 10 games, and nine points since being moved to the wing seven games ago.
Cooper called that an unselfish move and offered Stamkos’ offensive surge as evidence of how his captain is among the game’s best.
“I think it’s funny how it works, because the spotlight is on you so often that everybody just expects greatness all the time,” said Cooper. “To become great you do fail sometimes. And he’s great.
“But you don’t get there by just success; it’s the guys that fight through failure that rise to the top.”
That might as well have been the team’s entire mantra after giving up 10 goals over two games heading in. Ben Bishop was under fire — there’ll be no need for any “asinine” questions about who is starting Game 6 — and so was the penalty kill.
No more.
The Lightning were assessed four minor penalties in the opening half of Sunday’s game and killed them all. It was shortly after the last one when Anton Stralman banked the puck to Stamkos and Filppula scored his third goal of the playoffs.
Once they got that lead, the ice available to the Rangers disappeared. There was no real sustained push by the home side and Bishop stopped all 26 shots sent his way.
“You’re not losing many games having a shutout,” Stralman deadpanned. “Our game is defence first. I know you guys haven’t seen a lot of it, but we definitely stepped up our game tonight.
“We took care of our end before we went out on the offence, and that’s where we play our best, I think.”
Perhaps the most impressive part of Tampa’s journey has been its response at critical times. The Lightning won Games 6 and 7 against Detroit in the first round before delivering a defensive masterpiece in Game 6 at home to knock out Montreal.
This promises to be an even tougher test than those.
The Rangers are a resilient bunch who have gone 14-3 in elimination games since 2012, and won’t go quietly. They never do.
“It’s only us that can control our destiny here,” said captain Ryan McDonagh.
“That team is playing extremely well,” added coach Alain Vigneault. “I think our experience in these situations might come in and help. But at the end of the day, we’ve got to go out and execute and we’re going to have to play our best game of the year.”
Stamkos has certainly found his best at an important time.
It’s pretty tough for any opponent to shut down both the Triplets and Stamkos-Filppula-Alex Killorn trio. Despite all of the negative attention early in the playoffs, Stamkos remained positive.
“I knew I was playing the right way,” he said. “When you play the right way, things are going to start going your way.”
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Stamkos and Victor Hedman are the only Lightning players who fell one game short of the Stanley Cup final in 2011. Hedman says he can still “taste the disappointment” from that experience.
For most of the others — outside of veterans Brenden Morrow, Brian Boyle and Stralman — this is something new. In fact, most of the playoffs have been, and so far they’ve managed just fine.
“Our team, we’re a growing team,” said Stralman. “We haven’t been put in a lot of tricky situations. This is kind of the first test for us and I think we grew a lot from that Game 7 against Detroit. That whole series was really a tough up-and-down type of series.
“Being up 3-0 against Montreal and not executing Š I think we learned a lesson there that we can’t lose track, we can’t lose focus. And now we’re in a situation again where we can close out a series.”
Kids, they grow up so fast.
