TAMPA - Sunday night's Stadium Series showdown at Raymond James Stadium in Tampa had a little bit of everything. A goal 11 seconds into the game. Five straight goals for the Bruins. A big comeback by the Lightning. Overtime. A shootout. A goalie fight!
When it was all said and done, though, it also had something else for Boston: A lot of frustration. The Bruins were seemingly in disbelief with how the second half of the game played out – not just because Tampa Bay scored four straight goals before winning 6-5 in the shootout, but because the Lightning benefitted from seven straight power plays from the 9:07 mark of the second period through the end of the game.
They scored on three of their eight power plays overall, including two 5-on-3 goals just 23 seconds apart late in the second period. The Bruins owned up to their own undisciplined play, but expressed their dismay with one call in particular, as well as the lack of calls against Tampa Bay throughout the final 35 minutes of the game.
"We didn't get any calls," Charlie McAvoy said postgame. "We didn't get any calls. Very frustrating."
"We all have good days. We all have bad days," Marco Sturm said when asked about the officiating. "...I can tell you that we do have to do a better job, and they probably have to do a better job too."
McAvoy got tripped right in front of a ref while trying to kill one of those Tampa Bay 5-on-3s, but somehow there was no call. That was one major point of frustration.
An even bigger point of frustration came in overtime, though. Twenty-two seconds into the extra session, David Pastrnak appeared to win it for Boston. He took a pass from Marat Khusnutdinov on a 2-on-1 and buried it. But then the whistle blew and the ref waved off the goal. After a confusing few seconds, Pastrnak was then sent to the penalty box for a slash.
The call was both soft and super late. For some reason, the whistle didn't blow when the Bruins got possession. When Jeremy Swayman saw the ref's arm go up, he headed for the Boston bench, assuming it was a delayed call against the Lightning.
Pastrnak didn't shy away from sharing his opinion of the sequence.
"Joke," he said. "I don't understand. I've never seen something like that. To me, it was a joke. I don't care if it's a bad answer, but that's how I feel."
"I think that made us more mad than the calls," Morgan Geekie said of the winning goal that wasn't. "Just the fact that Sway was out of the net and we carried it all the way down the ice and we scored without anyone blowing the whistle. So, he [the ref] obviously saw something that none of us did, but we might've been watching two ice sheets."
Earlier in the night, Geekie had done his part to help the Bruins build their 5-1 lead. He scored their second and fifth goals, one on a deflection of a McAvoy shot and one on a nice one-time finish off a Pastrnak pass.
The Bruins had fallen behind just 11 seconds into the game, but then turned around and dominated the rest of the first period. Alex Steeves scored his first goal since Dec. 23 to tie the game at 1-1, off a nice setup from Mikey Eyssimont, who registered his first point since Dec. 16.
After Geekie's first goal and then a similar-looking goal on a McAvoy shot tipped in by Viktor Arvidsson, the Bruins led 3-1 after the first and had a 20-8 advantage in shots.
The Bruins added two more goals early in the second, with Geekie scoring his 32nd goal of the season and Matt Poitras scoring his first. They seemed to be running away with a dominant win… but then things turned dramatically for the remainder of the second period as the Bruins ran into the kind of penalty trouble that has plagued them all season.
Oliver Bjorkstrand scored on the power play after a McAvoy roughing penalty. Darren Raddysh scored on a 5-on-3 after a Swayman delay of game penalty that was immediately followed by a Tanner Jeannot interference. Then Nick Paul made it a 5-4 game 23 seconds later on yet another 5-on-3 after Sean Kuraly closed his hand on the puck.
In the midst of all that chaos was the most chaotic moment of the night: a goalie fight between Swayman and Andrei Vasilevskiy. Swayman didn't like Brandon Hagel taking an extra whack at him after the whistle, so he jumped Hagel. That led to a giant scrum, and Vasilevskiy decided to make his way towards center ice, suggesting he was ready to get involved. Swayman was more than happy to oblige, and both goalies ripped off their masks, gloves and blockers and went at it, with Swayman landing one good punch before Vasilevskiy quickly got a wrestling takedown.
The fight fired up a sellout crowd of 64,617 that had gone pretty quiet as the Bruins built up their big lead, and both benches clearly appreciated their netminder's effort, but it was the Lightning who found more momentum afterwards.
The Bruins continued to visit the penalty box, and the Lightning continued to score. The always-dangerous Nikita Kucherov was at the center of it all with a goal and three assists. In the shootout, it was Jake Guentzel who scored the lone goal, with Pastrnak's final bid to extend the game hitting the post.
Amid all the postgame venting, Sturm also found positives he wants to see his team build on as they now head to the other side of Florida for their final game before the Olympic break, Wednesday night against the Panthers.
"We were playing today without our top two centermen [Elias Lindholm and Pavel Zacha], and the way our young kids played today was very impressive," Sturm said. "The way our overall team played was impressive. So, we did a lot of good things. Don't get me wrong. We did a lot of good things, and it was just unfortunate, but we will take that point. I'm very, very happy how we are as a team right now. And again, we're gonna have one more game before the break, and we're gonna give everything we can to get two points against Florida."