Blackhawks run into hot goalie in loss
Blackhawks coach Joel Quenneville called it a goalie win, and from watching Tampa Bay’s Ben Bishop turn away chance after chance, it was tough to disagree.
Bishop made 37 saves through overtime and stopped all 3 shootout attempts as the Lightning rallied from a 2-0 deficit in the third period to defeat the Hawks 3-2 Saturday night at the United Center.
“I didn’t mind the way we played,” Quenneville said. “They got a goalie win out of the game. If we play like that we’ll find a way to get 2 points. Sometimes you get a goalie win on the other side and you don’t get a point, so I guess that was a positive. Certainly we did what we wanted to do tonight.”
The win for Tampa Bay came after an opening-night loss in Boston.
“It’s the first one of the season, so it’s always big,” Bishop said. “And then it’s against the defending Stanley Cup champions, which is also big. A comeback win in this building says a lot about this team.”
After going the first period without a shot, the Lightning got goals from Martin St. Louis and Teddy Purcell on a power play less than two minutes apart midway through the third period to force overtime.
“We weren’t happy with the way we were playing, and we had 20 minutes to fix it and show as a team what we could do,” Bishop said. “The first two periods wasn’t really acceptable. We did a good job in the third.”
The Hawks finished with a 39-16 advantage in shots.
“It was a near perfect game for us,” Hawks goalie Corey Crawford said. “We put a lot of pucks on net and had a lot of chances, but their guy played unbelievable.”
The Hawks took a 2-0 lead in the first 10 minutes of the second period on goals by Patrick Kane and Brandon Saad.
Kane got his second of the season 59 seconds into the period when he flipped a Bryan Bickell rebound over Bishop after Niklas Hjalmarsson took the puck hard to the net.
Saad’s goal came on a power play at 9:14 and also was his second of the year. He will never have an easier one.
He had an open net to shoot at after Bishop came out to play Nick Leddy’s dump-in that hit the glass funny and landed in the crease. Saad had the easy tap-in before Bishop could recover.
It was Bishop’s only gaffe of the game.
“There’s a reason they’re the Stanley Cup champs, and they showed us for most of the game why they’re the best team in the league,” Lightning coach Jon Cooper said. “We needed Ben Bishop to stand tall if we had any chance of coming back, and he did.
“I was looking for the police when we left the locker room because I thought we’d get arrested for stealing.”
Saad didn’t think the Hawks got enough traffic to the net around Bishop.
“He played well, but we’ve got to get more guys to the net,” Saad said. “There are a lot of great goaltenders in this league, so we just got to stick with it and keep battling. They just didn’t go in for us tonight.”
Steven Stamkos assisted on both Tampa Bay goals.
“They’re not always pretty, especially against this team in this rink; they’re going to take 2 points every night,” Stamkos said. “We hung around and our goalie played very well tonight.”
Bishop stopped Jonathan Toews, Patrick Kane and Marian Hossa in the shootout while Valtteri Filppula scored Tampa’s lone shootout goal.
ŸFollow Tim’s hockey reports on Twitter @TimSassone and check out his Between the Circles blog at dailyherald.com.