TAMPA, Fla. \u2013 The Buffalo Sabres were moments from securing all four points on their two-game Florida trip, but they\u2019ll have to settle for three after a late comeback by the Tampa Bay Lightning.<\/p>\n
Lightning defenseman Darren Raddysh tied the game with 26 seconds remaining in regulation, and forward Jake Guentzel scored on an overtime breakaway to hand the Sabres a 4-3 overtime loss Tuesday at Benchmark International Arena.<\/p>\n
Buffalo leads the NHL in empty-net goals and has excelled at 5-on-6 defense over the last couple months, but the hard-shooting Raddysh, one of the top scoring defensemen in the league this year, had space to step into a one-timer and beat goalie Colten Ellis.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think we just shrunk a little bit too deep, gave them a little bit too much room for the shot,\u201d said Sabres coach Lindy Ruff.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut heck of an effort. You could see that, back to back, (we) didn\u2019t quite have the energy early, but we found some energy late.\u201d<\/p>\n
The more rested Lightning had the bulk of the chances early, and they turned a Sabres giveaway into a Nikita Kucherov goal. Ellis was Buffalo\u2019s best player as he made 12 saves in the first period, including five on high-danger chances, per Natural Stat Trick. The rookie goalie finished with 31 saves.<\/p>\n
\u201cColten was huge for us,\u201d forward Josh Doan said. \u201cIn the first period, we gave up way too many odd-man rushes and chances against, and he shut the door for us. He played a heck of a game for us.\u201d<\/p>\n
That goaltending paved the way for another offensive takeover from Mattias Samuelsson, whose second two-goal game gives him 11 tallies this season. Late in the first, he found the tiniest of holes in Andrei Vasilevskiy and beat the Tampa goalie from a near-impossible angle, tying the game at one.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"TAMPA, Fla. \u2013 The Buffalo Sabres were moments from securing all four points on their two-game Florida trip,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":142968,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[135,137,136],"class_list":["post-142967","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tampa","tag-tampa","tag-tampa-headlines","tag-tampa-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/142967","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=142967"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/142967\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/142968"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=142967"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=142967"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=142967"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}