TAMPA, Florida – The Tampa Bay Lightning eliminated the New York Rangers 2-1 in the sixth game of the Eastern Conference Finals on Saturday night to advance to their third consecutive Stanley Cup final.
Steven Stamkos scored both goals to propel Lightning over the Rangers, who watched as his stunning and dramatic playoff career ended in the conference final.
The Lightning are trying to become the first team to win the championship since the New York Islanders in 1983. The Stanley Cup final between the Lightning and the Colorado Avalanche will begin Wednesday in Denver. The Avalanche are looking for their first Stanley Cup since 2001.
The Eastern Conference final was presented as a battle between Lightning goalkeeper Andrei Vasilevskiy and Rangers goalkeeper Igor Shesterkin, and match 6 was a fitting climax. Shesterkin made 28 saves, some of them spectacular, to keep the Rangers in the game.
Vasilevskiy (20 stops), meanwhile, continued his dominance in possible series games. He now has 13 wins in 24 possible playoff series finals of his career and has only allowed one goal or less in 11 of those games.
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The first period was goalless thanks to Shesterkin. He made pat stops at Pat Maroon and Anthony Cirelli and a fantastic skate stop at a Pierre-Edouard Bellemare detour. He did more magic in the second period with a tremendous stop on a chance by Nikita Kucherov.
Shesterkin made 16 stops before Lightning captain Steven Stamkos hit the post long. It was the 40th playoff goal of the Lightning captain’s career and the eighth of the postseason.
Lightning finished the second period with a 1-0 lead with a 23-13 lead.
The Rangers finally won a power play opportunity at 2:26 of the third period. They entered the game with the best conversion rate in the playoffs (31.5%), but only had 3:15 of power-play time in the previous two games. The Lightning killed this man advantage, but not the second in New York.
With Stamkos in the penalty area to hit, Frank Vatrano fired a shot ahead of Vasilevskiy for his fifth of the playoffs at 13:07 of the third period.
But Stamkos would respond with his ninth in the playoffs just 21 seconds later.
Kucherov found Stamkos with a streak in the Rangers’ net with a pass. He fired the puck into Shesterkin’s glove, but the puck jumped into the air and bounced off Stamkos’ leg into the net to make it 2-1. The focus was on video review by the NHL status room.
The Rangers failed to tie. His offense came to just one goal for the third game in a row.
Rangers coach Gerard Gallant hinted before the sixth game that he could make line-up changes and they were plentiful. He struck out striker Kaapo Kakko, the second overall pick in 2019, for the first time in the postseason and replaced him with striker Dryden Hunt. It also broke the duo of Chris Kreider and Mike Zibanejad, who had anchored the Rangers’ most productive line in the playoffs.
Lightning lost defender Victor Hedman in the final 10:45 of the second period after Rangers striker Alexis Lafreniere hit him in the head. But Hedman returned to start the third period.