The 2026-27 Tampa Bay Lightning squad opened their season at Madison Square Garden on Thursday, falling 5-1 to the New York Rangers.<\/p>\n
The home team grabbed a 3-0 lead and never surrendered the advantage despite multiple Lightning power-play opportunities.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think the disappointing thing for me is a coach understands you\u2019re going to lose games, you\u2019re going to win games, but it\u2019s how you go about that,\u201d Lightning head coach Jon Cooper said of the game. “I just thought we had limited pushback, and that\u2019s just not a staple of what\u2019s gone on in this room.”\u00a0<\/p>\n
Rangers forward Mika Zibanejad opened the scoring with a power-play goal after Pavel Dorofeyev\u2019s one-timer hit the crossbar and the puck found an open Zibanejad at the left circle in the game\u2019s fifth minute. The Rangers then made it 2-0 midway through the opening frame, this time on a Dorofeyev shot at the left hashmark to finish a rush chance with former Bolt Oliver Bjorkstrand after a turnover.<\/p>\n
Despite Tampa Bay out-chancing the Rangers in the opening period, the Rangers held the lead on the scoring front.\u00a0Eeli Tolvanen then tripled the Rangers\u2019 advantage in the opening moments of period two when his centering pass caromed in.<\/p>\n
The Lightning got a fortunate bounce of their own to get involved in the offense, when Nikita Kucherov\u2019s spinning pass at the goal line turned into the 3-1 goal thanks to a bounce off the skate of a Ranger at the net 7:59 into the middle frame.<\/p>\n
Ilya Mikheyev and Brayden Point earned assists on the play. The goal marked Kucherov\u2019s third time scoring a season-opening goal (also: 2023, 2019) for Tampa Bay, tying Martin St. Louis for most in franchise history (2011, 2009, 2008).<\/p>\n
The Rangers then built on their lead to make it 4-1 with four minutes to play in the period, this time on an open netfront redirection by forward Gabe Perreault.<\/p>\n
“There was going to be some bobbled pucks, there was\u00a0gonna be some misconnections on game one of the season,\u201d defenseman John Carlson said. “I think that’s a little bit of what’s expected, but I think there was just missing that little oomph in our game that we expect from each other and that’s why we came up short.\u201d<\/p>\n
Rangers goalie Igor Shesterkin was central in the victory for the home team, stopping 24 of 25 shots on goal before ending the night with an empty-net goal. Andrei Vasilevskiy made 20 stops in the other net.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Tampa Bay got several looks at the power play, finishing 0-for-7 on the man advantage and 1-for-2 on the penalty kill.<\/p>\n
“Those types of things, you’ve just got to go back to the drawing board I think. You see the PKs now, you work on it,\u201d forward Brandon Hagel said of the power play. “You don’t have a ton of time to work on it, but we got better. I think there was maybe a lack of execution in some areas, but other than that I think we’ll be fine. It’s one game. It’s one of those things, I’d be more worried about 5-on-5 than I would be about the power play. Once we get that back on track, I think everything kind of clicks.”<\/p>\n
Tampa Bay returns to Benchmark International Arena for this season\u2019s home opener on Saturday, when they\u2019ll face the Washington Capitals at 7 p.m.<\/p>\n
Benjamin\u2019s Three Stars:<\/p>\n
Igor Shesterkin, NYR (Goal, 24 SVs)<\/p>\n
Pavel Dorofeyev, NYR (Goal, assist)<\/p>\n
Nikita Kucherov, TBL (Goal)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The 2026-27 Tampa Bay Lightning squad opened their season at Madison Square Garden on Thursday, falling 5-1 to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":416420,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[135,137,136],"class_list":["post-416419","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\/416419","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=416419"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/416419\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/416420"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=416419"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=416419"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=416419"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}