TAMPA, Fla. _ For a brief moment, it looked as though the Devils could turn the ice. After falling behind early, they shut down a vaunted top line, matched lines and took advantage of a late power play.
But in the Game 1 of their first-round Stanley Cup Playoff series against the Eastern Conference's best team, the Tampa Bay Lightning, the comeback fell short. The Lightning exerted their will and did what they do best, creating offense to push the game out of reach, winning 5-2 on Thursday night at Amalie Arena.
Travis Zajac scored a third-period power-play goal to give the Devils hope and Taylor Hall scored in the second period and assisted on Zajac's goal for his first playoff points. In his first career postseason game, Keith Kinkaid made 28 saves.
Zajac scored at 9:35 to make it a one-goal game, cutting the Lightning lead to 3-2. But less than three minutes later Yanni Gourde found Alex Killorn on the rush and it was all over from there.
Nikita Kucherov scored an empty-net goal to close the scoring and put the Devils in an 0-1 hole going into Game 2.
It was a valiant effort from a team who fell behind 3-0 in the first two periods and struggled to hold on to the puck until midway through the second period.
A power play at 9:28 in the second turned the tide for the Devils. While they didn't score with the man-advantage, they created momentum that carried over into the next few shifts and allowed them to sustain more offensive pressure. They used the forecheck to create chances around the net and for the most part, it worked.
They outshot Tampa 15-7 in the second and were opportunistic when a key player made a bad mistake.
Ondrej Palat and his line gave the Devils problems all night, but late in the second period, his mistake led to Hall's goal. Palat's pass out of the corner went right to Hall, who was all alone in the low slot. He teed him right up for the point-blank shot and goalie Andrei Vasilevskiy bobbled it, letting it trickle across the goal line into the net.
After staunchly defending in their own zone for the first 15 minutes of play, the Devils' defense finally cracked. Tyler Johnson found Palat in the low slot, he deked Kinkaid and got him going the other way and was able to chip it in from close range to open the scoring.
Just 4:29 later, the Johnson-Palat tandem struck again, this time it was Palat dishing to Johnson in the low slot, who banked it in off the post to give the Lightning a 2-0 lead.
That 2-0 lead seemed bigger than it looked on the scoreboard. The Devils could barely string two passes together through the neutral zone, never mind getting sustained pressure. And a bad penalty taken in their own zone by Miles Wood just five seconds into the second period gave the league's third-best regular season power play a chance to establish dominance in the postseason.
Sure enough, the Lightning capitalized. Palat set up Gourde and it was 3-0 less than two minutes into the period.
Hall's goal highlighted a much-improved period for the Devils, but ultimately a three-goal lead was too much to overcome against an elite puck possession team. Tampa Bay was able to withstand the push from the Devils and build on their lead when the opportunities arose.
