Lightning’s season ends with negated goals in Game 5 loss to Panthers
SUNRISE — Jon Cooper walked off the ice Monday night at Amerant Bank Arena and into the offseason, dodging plastic rats after the traditional end-of-series handshake line. The Lightning coach looked up into the stands before disappearing down the tunnel, shaking his head in frustration.
After dropping the first three games to the Panthers, the Lightning might not have had enough to dig out and win the best-of-seven series against their cross-state rivals. But having two goals negated in the middle of a tightly-contested Game 5 certainly stymied their chance to turn the tide.
Their 6-1 loss ended what was a roller-coaster season with their second straight first-round playoff exit — after three straight rides to the Stanley Cup final (and back-to-back championships). The Lightning eliminated Florida in their two previous playoff meetings, but this time, the Panthers were better.
“Good teams find a way and we’ve certainly done that in the past and they did that,” said Lightning captain Steven Stamkos, who is an unrestricted free agent this offseason. “You have to give the other team credit. That’s a really good, deep hockey team.”
Cooper didn’t make any excuses that a better fortune would have allowed the Lightning to escape the Panthers. But the fact that his team was, in his opinion, robbed of two goals by goaltender interference calls was a bitter pill to end his season with.
The Lightning’s plan in Game 5 was to be physical in the net front. Panthers goaltender Sergei Bobrovsky had been the best player on the ice throughout the series, so getting bodies in front of him to make him uneasy was the blueprint.
“It’s a big game plan for us to be at that net,” said center Anthony Cirelli. “So in those situations, you want to be as tight as you can without bumping them or without being in the paint. ... It’s a game of inches. It’s right there.”
When Cirelli’s game-opening goal was taken off the scoreboard 13 minutes into the first period — following a successful Florida challenge that ruled forward Anthony Duclair had interfered with Bobrovsky — the Lightning were frustrated.
But when Mikhail Sergachev beat Bobrovsky from long distance for a potential tying goal with 2:12 left in the second period, a goal that was immediately waived off by a goaltender interference call on Cirelli, and the Lightning’s ensuing challenge failed, it seemed like the Lightning were battling more than the Panthers.
“We just capitalized on a few that didn’t count tonight,” Stamkos said. “And that was the game plan, to get more pucks towards the net, get some screens in front and some traffic, and we did that. It just didn’t go our way.”
Cooper waited until the end of his postgame news conference to address the interference calls, and he used the forum for a four-minute argument that only a former lawyer could make.
“Are net front battles not allowed anymore?” Cooper said. “That’s part of everybody’s game. The boxing out that goes on out there, it’s like prison rules in the playoffs, but it’s not prison rules for the goalie? ... Like we might as well put skirts on them then if that’s how it’s going to be.”
“I mean, they have to battle through stuff, too,” Cooper added. “And when the players are working so hard, on both teams, and it’s like I said, it’s a war out there, I think we’re letting the goalies off the hook. And they’ve got way more pads on than everybody else does.”
Cooper made it clear that if the calls went the Lightning’s way Monday, it didn’t mean they’d win the series or even the game.
“But it’s the circumstance we were put in that I felt — again, this is just my opinion — I felt was a little unfair,” Cooper said. “And just the spirit of the rule, especially in the playoffs, like, c’mon, how do you let those slide?”
On Cirelli’s goal, Duclair did make contact with Bobrovsky’s glove, but his stick was also being held by Panthers defenseman Gustav Forsling next to him. And Bobrovsky reached forward to attempt a poke check with no interruption and then swept his stick in the opposite direction of Duclair in an unsuccessful attempt to block Cirelli’s shot.
“There’s mandates, and the words were to pull a goal off the board, it has to be unbelievably egregious,” Cooper said. “That’s the standard to pull a goal off the board. Well, the first one’s on the board, and I couldn’t find anything remotely egregious about that.”
On Sergachev’s play, the review noted incidental contact by Cirelli — who was in a net front battle with Panthers defenseman Niko Mikkola — impeded Bobrovsky. But in Cooper’s eyes, Bobrovksky did a remarkable job of selling a penalty to the officials, losing his stick in the process, which made them immediately waive off the goal.
“He quit on the play,” Cooper said of Bobrovsky. “He completely quit, didn’t see it ... and then flailed. There was maybe incidental contact at most. ... They saw the reaction of the goaltender and Bob’s doing the right thing and he duped them.”
It was still a one-goal game going into the third, but the negated goals seemed to take everything out of the Lightning. And they weren’t otherwise perfect. The power play sputtered, going 0-for-3, even allowing a shorthanded goal that gave Florida a 2-1 lead. They made several egregious turnovers, including a handful by Hart Trophy candidate Nikita Kucherov, and couldn’t clear several long rebounds that led to goals.
“When you win in the playoffs, you need some bounces, you need some calls, you need a lot of things to go right,” Stamkos said. “We probably disagreed with some of the calls today, with regards to the goals, and those are big momentum shifts in a game, and that’s the way it is. But we battled our asses off.”
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