Tampa Bay heads into Game 4 on Sunday night needing a response, and it will get it at Bell Centre in Montréal, where the Lightning face the Canadiens at 7 p.m. ET. Montreal has taken a 2-1 series lead with three straight one-goal games in the first-round matchup, opening with a 4-3 overtime win, dropping Game 2 by a 3-2 overtime score, then rebounding with another 3-2 overtime victory in Game 3.
The pressure falls on Andrei Vasilevskiy, who is 1-2 with an.880 save percentage in his two starts, and on the top of Tampa Bay’s lineup, where Brandon Hagel and Jake Guentzel each have five points in the series. That production has kept the Lightning close, but not close enough to erase Montreal’s edge.
The regular season offered little separation between these teams. Tampa Bay went 2-2-0 against Montreal, beating it 6-1 on Dec. 9 and 5-4 in a shootout on Dec. 28, while Montreal answered with a 4-1 win in March and a 2-1 result in April. The playoff history is tighter still: Tampa Bay is 13-9 all-time against Montreal in the postseason and 5-5 in playoff road games against the Canadiens.
That history gives Tampa Bay reason to believe Sunday can shift the series, even with the margin for error gone. Nikita Kucherov has 17 playoff points against Montreal in 16 games, and Vasilevskiy carries a.917 career save percentage across six playoff starts against the Canadiens, numbers that point to a Lightning team with enough past success to make this a real fight.
The problem is that Montreal has repeatedly found the last goal. Tampa Bay has already seen that script twice in this series, and now it has to break it in the building where the Canadiens have held the upper hand. Game 4 is the hinge point: if the Lightning cannot level the series on Sunday, they will be asking for a comeback that gets harder to make with every overtime gone by.