without coach Jon Cooper<\/a>\u00a0on the bench. Cooper, who led Canada to the silver medal at the Milan Cortina Games, will miss two games after the death of his father, Robert.<\/p>\nAssistant Rob Zettler stepped in for Cooper and the Lightning ended the Maple Leafs’ three-game winning streak.<\/p>\n
The Russian-born Kucherov got his 700th assist in his 855th NHL game, becoming the second-fastest player born outside of North America to reach the mark and trailing only Peter Stastny (784 games). The milestone assist came on Goncalves’ goal at 7:58 of the second period that gave the Lightning a 2-0 lead.<\/p>\n
Kucherov’s 30th goal came at 2:59 of the third and made it 3-0. His nine 30-goal seasons tie him with Steven Stamkos for the most in team history.<\/p>\n
John Tavares and Matthew Knies scored and Anthony Stolarz made 32 saves for the Maple Leafs, whose five-game winning streak against the Lightning was stopped.<\/p>\n
With Stolarz pulled to give Toronto an extra skater, Tavares scored with 3:41 remaining to end the shutout bid for Vasilevskiy. It came moments after Jake Guentzel missed an empty-net goal for the Lightning when his shot hit the post.<\/p>\n
After Point made it 4-1, Knies capped the scoring with 2:47 left for Toronto. Auston Matthews had an assist on the goal, tying Tim Horton for 10th on the career franchise list with 349.<\/p>\n
Up next<\/p>\n
Maple Leafs: Play at Florida on Thursday night.<\/p>\n
Lighting: Play at Carolina on Thursday night.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"TAMPA, Fla. (AP) \u2014 Nikita Kucherov scored to give him his ninth 30-goal season and added two assists…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":169740,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[2205,28,4386,115,110,135,862,137,136],"class_list":{"0":"post-169739","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tampa","8":"tag-associated-press","9":"tag-florida","10":"tag-hockey","11":"tag-news","12":"tag-sports","13":"tag-tampa","14":"tag-tampa-bay-lightning","15":"tag-tampa-headlines","16":"tag-tampa-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/169739","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=169739"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/169739\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/169740"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=169739"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=169739"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=169739"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}