The win is Tampa Bay’s first since Dec. 28.
Yet when the Hurricanes tied the game on a Jordan Staal deflection with 9:56 remaining, Tampa Bay wasn’t thinking about the losing streak. Instead they pulled together.
“We just had confidence in each other and picked each other up and we didn’t get down,” Tampa Bay forward Nick Paul said. “We knew we were gonna come up with that, and we did.”
Brandon Hagel got the Lightning on the board with 3:22 left in the first period, his18th goal of the season coming in front of the Carolina net. Defenseman Darren Raddysh floated a backhand shot from the right half of the offensive blueline, and Hagel’s second rebound rip went through Kochetkov for the 1-0 lead.
The Hurricanes tied the game 6:31 into period two on a backhand shot by forward Andrei Svechnikov, but Raddysh also helped setup the second Tampa Bay goal to regain the lead.
With time dwindling on a Tampa Bay power play, Raddysh unleashed a shot from the top of the zone. The puck found Paul at the right mouth of the net, and the forward buried his 10th goal of the season to make it 2-1 Tampa Bay with 10:43 left in the second period.
"I think that's probably the most simple thing you can do in hockey is just throw it on net and good things will happen,” Raddysh said postgame. “And that's kind of the way it is in the playoffs, too. So we’ve just got to make sure we continue to do the simple things and play to our strengths.”
Raddysh led the Lightning with two assists. He became the fastest defensemen in franchise history to record 50 NHL assists on Tuesday, doing so in his first 133 NHL games. He beat former record holder Pavel Kubina, who did so in 145 career games.
The Lightning received 30 saves from goalie Andrei Vasilevskiy in the win, the team’s first of 2025 and first in five games.
"I think we were just disappointed from how the last four games had went,” Raddysh said. “That’s the standard that we have is winning hockey games and getting points. So you can say there was a little bit of relief, but that's just back to business as usual for us.”
After Staal deflected home a Brent Burns shot with 10:04 left in the third, Brayden Point closed the night’s scoring with spinning showmanship—a waiting Point in the slot received a Nikita Kucherov pass from the right wall, and the former spun the puck to his forehand around a Carolina defender before beating Kochetkov under the blocker.
