Red Wings Spoil Tampa's Perfect Barn With a 2-0 Road Win
The Lightning carried the play and found nothing, while a Brandsegg-Nygård finish and a Raymond strike were all Detroit needed.
Tampa Bay had the puck, the pressure and the better looks for most of the night, and still walked off home ice without a goal. Detroit took a 2-0 win by making its few good chances count and keeping the net shut the rest of the way.
The Lightning got the most pucks to the net, outshooting Detroit 31-22, and took six of every ten shot attempts in the game. Their chances added up to 2.98 expected goals (how many goals their chances would usually produce) against 2.62 for Detroit. That gap is small, but it leaned Tampa's way, and they had nothing to show for it.
The pushing came from the usual names. Nikita Kucherov fired 5 shots, Brandon Hagel and John Carlson had 4 each, and Jake Guentzel, on a line with Kucherov and Hagel, logged 26:23 of ice time with 3 shots. None of it went in, as Daniil Tarasov stopped all 31 shots he faced.
Detroit's scoring came from one trio. Michael Brandsegg-Nygård, on a line with Lucas Raymond and Andrew Copp, led the Red Wings with 4 shots and scored once. Raymond added a goal and an assist, and Copp and defenceman William Wallinder each picked up a helper. Andrei Vasilevskiy gave up just one goal on 21 shots, so the Lightning were not undone in their own crease.
No shots hit the iron, so there was no hard-luck ringer to point to. Tampa simply missed, and Detroit didn't, as the bounces went the Red Wings' way.
