celebrated head coach Jon Cooper\u2019s 1,000th game as Lightning head coach<\/a> with a resilient 4-3 overtime win over the Anaheim Ducks on Wednesday night.<\/p>\nTampa Bay held three separate one-goal leads, all of which were erased by the host Ducks before the Lightning got some overtime heroics from Brandon Hagel and defenseman Darren Raddysh to end 2025 with a victory.<\/p>\n
Raddysh\u2019s goal 2:47 into the overtime period stood as the winner when he poked home the puck after a feed from Hagel near the left wall. The assist was Hagel\u2019s third of the night to lead all players in scoring.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe knew it was going to be a fight like that,\u201d Hagel said postgame. \u201cIt feels like every game is like that, comes down to basically the buzzer. It happened today, and we made the last play.\u201d<\/p>\n
After an earlier Lightning goal was negated due to a coach\u2019s challenge for being offside, defenseman JJ Moser made sure to give the visitors a real 1-0 lead later in the first period.<\/p>\n
Raddysh fed Moser a pass at the left faceoff circle, where Moser pulled the puck to change the angle of his shot around a sliding Ducks defender before slipping his shot through the glove of goalie Lukas Dostal to make it 1-0 with 6:30 left in the first period.<\/p>\n
Moser\u2019s goal was his 99th career NHL point and first since signing an eight-year contract extension with the Lightning last Saturday. Hagel, who was named to Team Canada\u2019s 2026 Winter Olympics squad earlier in the day, earned the secondary assist on the play.<\/p>\n
Anaheim tied the game with 4:43 remaining in the second period on a 2-on-1 chance following a Lightning turnover, but Brayden Point restored Tampa Bay\u2019s advantage before the teams went to their respective locker rooms for the second intermission.<\/p>\n
Point redirected defenseman Max Crozier\u2019s shot pass from the point near the Anaheim net with 49 seconds remaining in the middle frame to make it 2-1, Point\u2019s seventh goal of the season.<\/p>\n
The Ducks forced another turnover early in the third period to knot the score 2-2.<\/p>\n
Rookie Beckett Senecke skated out of the corner and ripped his shot top shelf 3:57 into the final period of regulation, and the teams then traded power-play goals from Nikita Kucherov and Mason McTavish later in the frame to force overtime.<\/p>\n
In the extra period, Hagel drew a pair of Anaheim defenders to him near the left boards before deking around Troy Terry and feeding Raddysh for the tap-in goal at the net to win the game 4-3 with 2:23 remaining.<\/p>\n
The goal was Raddysh\u2019s ninth of the season, tying him for fifth among all NHL defensemen this season. He gave all the credit to Hagel postgame.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe did all the work on the wall and drew two guys to him and found me backdoor,\u201d Raddysh said of the play. \u201cIt was a great pass, great play by him and I was just fortunate to be there.\u201d<\/p>\n
Hagel\u2019s three assists led all players, while Raddysh and Kucherov each finished the game with a goal and assist. Lightning goalie Andrei Vasilevskiy also earned an assist on the overtime goal on a night he made 25 stops to pick up his 15th win of the season.<\/p>\n
Coach Cooper\u2019s win was the 595th of his NHL career, all with Tampa Bay, giving him the second-most in NHL history through a coach\u2019s first 1,000 games. The only coach ahead of him is Hockey Hall of Fame member Scotty Bowman (598 wins).<\/p>\n
Cooper became the fifth coach in NHL history to reach 1,000 games with a single franchise.<\/p>\n
\u201cI can speak from a player\u2019s perspective, not only do you come in this league and probably think about how you can stay in this league and how you can get better in this league, you probably don\u2019t think about 1,000,\u201d Hagel said of Cooper. \u201cTo reach 1,000 is an incredible milestone, and to be able to do it with one team is even more incredible, especially as a coach nowadays, they seemingly don\u2019t have a long string. Coop\u2019s done an incredible job.\u201d<\/p>\n
Benjamin\u2019s Three Stars:<\/p>\n
Brandon Hagel, TBL (3 assists)
\nDarren Raddysh, TBL (Goal, assist)
\nNikita Kucherov, TBL (Goal, assist)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The calendar flipped to 2026, and the win streak lives on for the Tampa Bay Lightning. Tampa Bay…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":216134,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[85,46,105],"class_list":{"0":"post-216133","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-sports","8":"tag-il","9":"tag-israel","10":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/216133","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=216133"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/216133\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/216134"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=216133"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=216133"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=216133"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}