The Detroit Red Wings and Tampa Bay Lightning meet for the final time Monday night, but their penultimate regular-season games will hold very different impacts for the Atlantic Division foes.
The Lightning (49-25-6, 104 points) are glad to be back home for their final two games after a bad four-game road trip. After losing the first three contests, they managed to get a good ending on Saturday afternoon with a 2-1 victory at the Boston Bruins.
Defenseman Emil Lilleberg netted the game-winner around the Boston cage with 95 seconds left.
Following their 1-3-0 final road trip, coach Jon Cooper’s club finished 24-12-5 this season away from Tampa.
The team is in a three-way battle with the Buffalo Sabres and Montreal Canadiens for the division title.
“We’re a really emotional team, and sometimes it’s tough to hold onto that for 82 games, especially what we’ve done this year,” said 36-goal scorer Brandon Hagel, who tallied after a five-game absence. “But at the end of the day, I thought once our emotion got into it, it seemed like we got something going.”
Two of the three Atlantic-leading clubs will wind up with home-ice advantage for the first round.
Division-leading Buffalo (106 points) plays at the Chicago Blackhawks, then home against the Dallas Stars. Tampa Bay hosts the New York Rangers on Wednesday, while Montreal (104 points) plays Sunday evening against the Islanders and ends at the Philadelphia Flyers on Tuesday.
“We understand where we’re slotted in here and probably need some help, but we do have a chance to get home ice,” Cooper said. “So there’s still something to play for.”
Meanwhile, the Red Wings (41-30-9, 91 points) saw their postseason hopes come to a crashing halt in a 5-3 home loss to New Jersey on Saturday, as the Devils’ Jesper Bratt broke a 3-all tie with less than four minutes left — following a defensive pinch that Dylan Larkin was part of.
The possibility of two points in overtime for Todd McLellan’s club fizzled into none, shutting Detroit out of the playoffs.
The loss meant the Wings missed the playoffs for the 10th straight season, extremely disappointing after playing solid hockey much of the way. Only Larkin, the team’s captain who missed seven games in March, has any playoff experience.
The squad went 3-3-1 in Larkin’s absence.
“We did a lot of great things and put ourselves in a really good position,” said Larkin, who has 34 goals and 33 assists in 73 games. “But when it gets tight, we come up short. We talked about it a lot this season and it happened again.
“I’m as down as I could be right now. … Two guys jump by me, and it is in our net.”
In the final two months with everything on the line, the Wings have gone 7-10-3 as they drifted in and out of the playoff standings.
“This is hard,” McLellan said. “It doesn’t matter if you miss by five points or 20 points, but we were playing well enough until the last month or so.”
Alex DeBrincat has played in every game thus far and tops the team in both goals (40) and points (83). Lucas Raymond is second with 76 points (25 goals, 51 assists).
Detroit will close the season at the Florida Panthers on Wednesday.
