Mike Sullivan and the New York Rangers had no answers for Jon Cooper and the Tampa Bay Lightning. After being humbled at home by the Bolts, the Blueshirts head coach’s postgame remarks stood in stark contrast to Cooper’s. So far, their NHL seasons have been like day and night, and their latest comments made that perfectly clear.
Scoreboard watchers could argue that a 4-1 loss—in which the final goal came on an empty net—is far from a tragic outcome in the NHL. However, in this case, the final score doesn’t do the story of the night justice. Sullivan and the Rangers were blown out of the water by Cooper’s Lightning. If not for Igor Shesterkin, the goal tally could’ve reached season highs. After the game, Sullivan didn’t mince words on his thoughts.
“We got outcompeted from the drop of the puck,” Sullivan commented per NHL.com. “There’s got to be a willingness and a want to be first to pucks, to embrace physicality. We knew the type of game it was going to be.
“That team, they’ve got hard skill, they compete and they skate. That was the type of game it was going to be. I don’t think we had the wherewithal to match the intensity. I just feel we lost puck battles all over the rink and it’s hard to establish any sort of game that you want to play if you don’t win puck battles.”
Cooper’s postgame comment
As for Cooper and the Bolts, their stay in The Big Apple couldn’t have been any better. Coming into the campaign with sky-high hopes, the Lightning have seemingly managed to exceed expectations. After the commanding victory against the Rangers, Cooper made sure to praise his players for yet another spotless outing.
“Honestly, we’ve got a really good vibe going,” Cooper admitted. “These back-to-backs are tough. We knew they had it too, and they had a goalie that was playing both games so we thought, hopefully we could jump on them early. Fortunately, we did.”
Lightning strikes twice—and more
Tampa Bay has now won seven straight, improved to 16-7-2 (8-2-2 away) on the NHL season, and is shaping up to be the biggest threat in the Eastern Conference. Only a glance around the locker room tells everything that needs to be known about the juggernaut in Cigar City.
The Lightning boast a roster that knows what it takes to win, a head coach whose leadership is second to none, an annual Hart Trophy candidate in Nikita Kucherov, enough depth to intimidate any opponent, and a goaltender in Andrei Vasilevskiy who routinely makes saves the human body shouldn’t be capable of. Needless to say, the Bolts are for real—and they made the most of their stay in New York City to put the league on notice.
The Rangers can’t catch a break
As for the Rangers, Shesterkin is capable of shutting the door just as well as any goalie in the league. However, with the team registering the fifth-lowest goals per game and the seventh-worst shots per game—2.63 and 25.9, respectively—the Russian netminder often finds himself left hanging out to dry. That’s especially true at Madison Square Garden, where the Blueshirts are 2-8-1 this season and have been outscored 31-17.