Lightning vs. Montreal 2026 Playoff Game 3 Raw Reaction

Stevie Z gives his reaction to the Bolts Game 3, 3-2 OT loss to Montreal. Let's just say he is not too pleased with the overall performance.

Transcript

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Five, four, three, two, one. What's going on, everyone? Steb Z here, 4-1 channel side podcast, raw reaction after game three. As the Bolts lose 3-2 in overtime to the Montreal Canadians on Elaine Hudson shot. I don't even know where to begin, to be quite honest with you. This was an absolute wasted effort. They wasted an incredible effort. The best playoff effort that we have seen from Andre Vasilevski in years. And I'll tell you what, the only way that they can rectify it is if they come out on Sunday night and play with some damn, like, I don't know what what gumption balls, I don't know, hair on fire. I mean, listen, the the first 30 minutes of the game, the bolts controlled. I believe it. They're controlling pace, they're just the possession. They looked really good. Obviously, we open up the game naturally and in Tampa Bay Lightning heritage form with a poor turnover by Braden Point that leads to a rush by Montreal's fourth line, poor coverage. Next thing you know, Texas got a puck. Vasi's not set, snipes it past Vasi 1-0 in the first five minutes of the game. And coming into the game, I'm thinking Tampa has to find a way to just survive the first 10 minutes because it's gonna be lively. Okay, that's fine. Point rectifies it a couple minutes later with a power play goal. His first of the series. And what he he, I believe I saw a stat on Braden Point. So that's his first goal since April 2nd, and his third since March 10th. So he needed that goal. I thought that the Boltz PK looked really good tonight. They go five for five. What five for five? And Tampa gets the lead off of a Hegel goal. I mean, Hegel is doing absolutely everything for this team right now. That second goal that Tampa scored, Hegel creates by himself, catches the puck at the at Montreal's blue line, skates it in, left circle, snipes it past Dilbesh, and then Dalbech is a little rattled. And literally, when he took that penalty, I'm thinking, yeah, Tampa's getting in his head. But then Tampa never went back anywhere near the crease for the rest of the game. Not with some purpose and intent. Tampa has an opportunity to really put this game on thin ice with a power play in the second period. And if you know the power play I'm talking about, it's the power play where they just decided to freaking pass it around for two minutes. And then sure enough, with one minute left on that power play, Cooper puts out the second unit. The second unit gets hemmed in as the power play is ending. Montreal's fourth line comes out, and the puck stays in Tampa's D-zone. Kirby Doc finds it, and Ryan McDonough, who was on the ice, gets up scrambling and tries to block the shot and it hits off of him and goes short side past Vasi because he just decided to put the puck on net. Tampa had 11 even strength shots tonight. 11. They had 17 shots. What, 17, 18 shots total? 17 shots. I don't know where in the hell the bolts get off thinking that that is going to be enough when Dobesh is giving up goals from the wall at the left circle and they just don't decide to do it again. Moving the puck so slow in the offensive zone that they have opportunities to shoot, but second guess themselves. And then by the time they want to shoot, Montreal is in position to block a shot. I thought that Montreal looked so open tonight from a defensive standpoint, the most open that they looked in three games, and Tampa did not capitalize after the first 30 minutes in this game. Go one for five on the power play. Because the first power play was really good, the second one was really good, even though they didn't score. And then from there, just terrible power play opportunities, just two minutes of skating around and passing. And it really irritates me that Vasilevsky, we get a performance that we have not seen in four first-round playoff appearances for Andre Vasilevsky, including this one. We have not seen a performance like that, and the Bolts waste it. That is ridiculous. Montreal dominated the second half of this game. Tampa didn't even look like they deserved to be skating with them. Like it was a tail, literally, a tail of first 30 minutes and a second 30 minutes, and then OT. And Tampa looked like they wanted just no part of it. Careless, slow hockey. Like they were lucky to be tied after two with the with the Habs late push. I mean, the first period, the first period I thought was good by Tampa. It was really good. It wasn't a bad period. They held serve. They got their feet under them. Early in the second period, really good from the Bolts. Took the lead. And then after they took the lead, the Bolts unraveled. Vasi having to make that that was the beginning of Vasi's breakaway saves. The first on Demidov, because they got too cute on the four-on-four in the offensive zone. Then McDonough draws a high stick penalty. Nothing doing. And that was the power play where we get a terrible defensive zone shift by the fourth line. Second unit, Dot gets the puck, hits off McDonough. And that was the fourth line's second five-on-five goal of the game. And then there was a five-minute stretch where the Bolts took three consecutive undisciplined penalties. I don't know where they get off thinking that that is going to be okay to win this series. Just sleepwalking through the period as if, okay, we've got it. This game is going to be, we're going to be straight. Tampa did what Montreal did in the second half of the third period and in OT. They sat back and they got comfortable. And they thought that they were just going to be able to just get away with being careless, not buttoned up, not detailed. Now, granted, the Bolts killed all three of those power plays. They finished the night four for four. But they were playing a clean game up until that point. Then they started playing with fire. And honestly, when you watch the lightning, you say, I've never seen a team undo themselves like the Lightning tend to do when they have control of games. Get into that third period. The Bolts are on their heels. Vassy has to make a huge breakaway save on Caulfield. Vassy has to make another save at the end of the Bolt's fifth power play as Anderson gets out of the box because the second unit is not being mindful of the time ending. And the Bolts end up one for five on the power play, and Vassi's having to make another big save off a breakaway. This was a careless game. Careless game by the Bolts. And to get to OT, I mean, on the back of this Vasi performance, incredible performance by Vasi. Shots for the game, 29 to 17. Montreal had 22 even strength shots, one shot, one goal in OT. They owned this game. Montreal deserved this win. But Tampa, Tampa didn't really give up much of a resistance in terms of quality of play. And that's what's frustrating. It is not so much, yeah, like it's the playoffs. You will take the steal for a win. And yeah, maybe this is a different reaction. But they didn't win, they lost. So now everything that I'm thinking is freaking validated because you play like shit, you play, you play with fire, you're gonna get burned eventually. And I got burned tonight. That Carlisle Lilliberg pairing, absolute disaster tonight. Getting stuck in their own zone, struggling to make a D to D pass. The goal that, the goal that Montreal scored to win it in OT. Lilleberg and Carlisle have opportunities to get the puck out of the net. Carlisle is soft on the puck on the wall. Sure enough, Montreal has their fourth line out on the ice. The puck finds Lane Hudson and a bunch of traffic in front of the net, and it's seeing ice shot again into the net. Montreal deserved to win this game. They were the better team for the latter half of this game. I'm not happy with the performance by the Bolts. I'm pissed. That was not a good performance. The bright spots, Brandon Hagel continues to be a bright spot. Sorelli looked good in the circle tonight. Bolts at one point were winning 55% of the face-offs. And I mean, what they've done to try to rectify that since the first game has been pretty good. Bolts 54% in the dot tonight. Not bad. That's a bright spot. Kucharov had one shot on net, but he had 12 shot attempts. He kept shooting the puck, which was good to see. Braden Point scored a goal. Good to see. Dominic James, Yanni Gord continue to be bright spots. I wish they would score a goal. You know, uh Moser and Radish are getting very comfortable with jumping up on the play. And uh I just that makes me a little bit nervous the way that's trending, just because they've scored some goals, because it always just seems they're out of position. Montreal transitions the puck so well, and we've got defensemen below the circles. I'm not gonna say to stop doing it because it it's it seems to be working. I would just hope that the lightning are mindful of that moving on to game four. And at some point, like I understand that Montreal is gonna push back, but Tampa is going to have to play better than just moments in a game. There's going to need to be consistency in their game. We have not seen it yet. And this idea of playing a full 60-minute game, that's not a relevant thing because what does that mean? That you does that mean that you're shutting down the opponent for an entire 60 minutes? I don't think that's really that's not feasible. That's not realistic. But if we're gonna talk about what a full 60 minutes looks like for the lightning, if they're playing 60 minutes, it's definitely gonna involve being more active than 17 shots. It's just frustrating the way they lost this game. Because you can pinpoint when the game turned, and Tampa struggled to get it back, and that happens within series. I think it's gonna be a long series. Like I said, I I my heart said bolts and five, my head said bolts and six. But if you keep playing with fire with these dumbass penalties and the lack of discipline and detail in their own zone, I mean, how many times were bolts forwards belying the defensive zone because they want to get transition offense going rather than just helping out somebody who's trying to get a breakout pass? And then the next thing you know, the puck is stuck in the Tampa D zone and the Bolts are scrambling, and they don't have net front coverage because guess what? They were so focused on generating offense and trying to catch Montreal napping rather than being detailed and being the second best defensive team in the league. That's frustrating as hell to watch. And I knew that this game wasn't gonna finish 2-1. It was gonna be tough for the Lightning to finish this game out with just over, just under 40 minutes left and try to hold out onto that win. They just weren't gonna do it. It hasn't really been the Lightning's MO. Right? They may hold teams to two goals for a majority of the time, and that's fine. But just it's blowing my mind that this series is 2-1, Montreal, Suzuki, Caulfield, Slavkovski still don't have a freaking five-on-five goal in this series. Montreal's fourth line and bottom six players are scoring all their goals. And this was crazy because I I highlighted this as a weakness for Montreal that they were going to have to find scoring beyond that first line. And sure as shit, they have. Guys who don't really score are doing it for Tampa. I'm sorry, for Montreal, because Montreal is number one willing to shoot, and Tampa is playing so relaxed and so careless in just poor instances in the game. Just it's not, it's never good to have a poor moment in a playoff game. But these guys are the fourth line or the bottom six of Montreal, the way they're scoring, they are either out battling Tampa's bottom six or whoever the hell's on the ice at the time when they score. They're either getting loose somehow in the offensive zone, or Tampa's not doing a good enough job to get the puck out of the D-zone. So Montreal's fourth line, bottom six guys just keep it in the zone. Like they don't need any help. Like, that's for certain. They don't need any help. So at some point, let's stop helping them. I mean, you've got Kirby Doc who could do no right through the first two games. That guy puts a puck on night, gets a goal. They're chanting his name. Got Texier, hasn't done jack shit in this series. It scores a goal. Josh Anderson, another opportunity tonight on a breakaway. Are you kidding me? I'm not really sure if that fourth line of Gergensen's Paul and uh and Perry is good. That line seems kind of slow to me. Paul's a good skater for a big guy. Um, but Perry, when that guy is tired, oh man. I mean, he's got no legs to keep going, right? He can't keep digging to find that that stride, that power when he's tired and he they get hemmed in the D zone. It happened on the on the goal that Doc scored. Thankfully, it's a seven-game series, but the Bolts are going to have to start playing better, more consistently, and not just in these spurts. Like you can see it. There are moments in each game where it's turning or Montreal is just absolutely dominating, and you're hoping that they do what they did tonight, which was just miss glorious chance after chance after chance. And that is not a way to win a playoff series. That's not a way to go about it. To be careless and just hope that Vasi's gonna bail you out. Man, that guy deserves a trip to one of Montreal's renowned strip clubs for the way he played tonight. Get him a nice steak dinner. Let him go throw a couple dollars because, and you know what? It should be on the team. The team pays the tab at the club tonight for Vasi if he decided to go. I know he won't, and I'm being a little hyperbolic here, but look, if he did, the team should foot the bill for him. That guy needs a break. Get him a massage. His back must hurt because he was carrying the team tonight. Because you know what? Nobody else wanted to do jack shit for the last 30 minutes of the game. I really hope that Dom James gets a goal in this series. I really hope that Yanni Gord gets a goal in this series. They the bottom six guys haven't produced a goal, but those guys specifically, alongside Gage Gonçalves tonight, looked really good, I thought. The James, um, you know, who was it? Was it James, Point, and Gonçalves? I thought they looked good. And Cooper was in his bag tonight with the chess match, just lines, lines switching constantly. And the D pairings were switching constantly too. And I'm not sure why that was happening. Sometimes you'd see like McDonough with Lilleberg and Chernak with Carlisle and Mosier with somebody and Radish with somebody. It wasn't consistent all night long. He was in his bag tonight trying to figure out what would work. Hegel Sorelli Cooch is still working. I mean, I you know, I just I said it before the series that if Tampa could keep Montreal's top guys off the score sheet, it was gonna be so beneficial. But because I wasn't expecting Montreal's fourth line to score goals. And it it's got me thinking, like, I mean, those guys are being way more effective than our bottom six. Just because of the because they're scoring. And obviously, like we're not asking our bottom six to score. The depth scoring is nice. You'd like it to be more even throughout. Like, Brandon Hagel's got four goals in this series already, and that's awesome. Play off the former. But you would really like to see a Gonçalves, a Perry, a Paul, a Gord, a Jane goal. At some point, it's gonna have to happen. Because to be honest, Montreal's like Mike Matheson is doing an incredible job against Kucharoff and Company on that line at five on five. He's doing really well. Tampa is going to have to continue to find ways to shoot the puck, and it doesn't start with passing the puck more. Dobesh was rattled after that second goal. It happened a couple shifts before that when he was grabbing and pushing Brain Point and his stick. And then, sure enough, when he gives up that goal by Hegel, a Couple shifts later in the second period. Guess what? Kucharov talked shit to him. He pushes Kucharoff. And I'm like, this is a young goalie. This is who they need to continue to get after. They have done it. They did in the second, in the in game two, in the third and OT. And after Tampa gave up the lead in the second period, they never went back to the crease. They never went back to the crease outside of that little skirmish in the third. Where Lilleberg gets ragged all by Jacqueline and Cory Perry's there. And like it's the battle of the fourth lines. Right? And outside of that, there was there was nothing in the blue paint for Tampa. They wouldn't even go near it. Everything was one and done, shots being blocked to the outside, and then next thing you know, somehow the puck squirts by because the shot gets blocked, and Tampa's giving up a transition chance. Or the puck is just going by. Puck's off the mark. Tampa's playing with fire, with the lack of detail that they are exhibiting in large portions of these games. Now, I'll say this. Sunday is a new game. Tampa's gonna have to win that. Get back here to Tampa with a series tied 2-2. I really thought Tampa was gonna go into game four with a lead. It would be nice if we could win one in regulation. That'd be good to see that it can't do the freaking OT anymore. It's it's gotta be bad for my health and all of your collective health as well. But I don't know. I sat there watching the game in OT, and I was like, I know exactly what's gonna happen. This game's gonna end fairly quick. Montreal deserves to win the game. They did. And sure enough, guess who was on their ice? The fourth line with their top D pairing involving Lane Hudson, and they get the goal. I'm really interested to see these uh these adjustments for game four. Because out of all the games that Tampa has played, I think tonight was is tonight the worst game? No, I can't even say it's the worst game because the it was the second half. It was like the the worst game was game two from the standpoint up until the third period. So it's like you do you guys understand what I'm saying? That Tampa is playing poorly in large stretches of games, and Montreal just happened to play really well. You have to give credit to Montreal. But at some point, somebody outside of Brandon Hagel is going to have to grab the bull by its horns and join the fight in dragging Tampa in this series. Brandon Hegel cannot do it alone. That does not mean mix it up, that does not mean you know do dirty things. That means somebody else other than Brandon Hegel is going to have to drive play offensively, and somebody outside of Sorelli and Hegel are going to have to step up defensively in terms of responsibility. McDonough has been caught out a few times in this series where it's like, uh-oh. You know, where he gets pressured, he can't get the puck out. Turning act two, it's just a lot of slow movement. And it's been a majority of that outside of the you know, that third period and OT in game two. I think Tampa has been second best through three games in a large portion of the series. And it's been so close. But look, like I said, Sunday is another day, game four is another game. Tampa is gonna have to get a split here in Montreal and force a game six in a sense, because if you don't, you're coming back home on Wednesday with the series in the balance. And up to this point, outside of a very small portion of three games, Tampa has not done enough to disrupt Dobesh to at a consistent level. They have not done enough to shore up how they are defensively in their own zone, getting the puck out, stopping with the overpassing. They just haven't. So I am interested to see the type of adjustments Coop makes for game four. Who's playing, who's not? Sabron didn't really play much tonight. Fourth line started OT. I I always do wonder though, like in the offensive zone, when they put out their like I get it, we have first change, but put out the big guns. Like, wait, you're putting out the fourth line, hoping that he's not gonna put out his fourth line? Like, uh Marty St. Louis's not gonna put out his fourth line. Like, we're in the offensive zone. Why do we get the fourth line out there? I'd never really understood that that tactic by John Cooper because I noticed it quite often. Like in the O zone, the fourth line would go out there, and I'm like, we need a goal. Why the hell are these guys out there? But they won the face-off, and then you know, Sorelli's line came out. I don't know. I'm not too happy with the lost, just from how it happened. They are gonna have to start playing better for more consistent stretches of games. But at the risk of continuing to repeat myself, that will do me on the game three raw reaction here at 401 channel side podcast. We will talk again Sunday night after game four. See you guys.