OTTAWA — Victor Hedman scored the overtime winner as the Tampa Bay Lightning defeated the Ottawa Senators 2-1 on Tuesday night.
Tampa finally beat Ottawa’s Mike Condon, who had 35 saves and was nothing short of spectacular at times.
The Lightning extended their winning streak to four games, but remain outside the playoff picture as a New York Islanders 3-2 overtime win over Carolina moves them into the final wild card with Tampa just behind.
Brayden Point also scored for Tampa (34-26-9), as Andrei Vasilevskiy made 31 saves.
Tommy Wingels scored for the Senators (39-22-7), who saw a six-game winning streak come to an end.
Ottawa was without goaltender Craig Anderson, who is sidelined with a lower body injury, as is Mark Stone. However, the Senators did get Bobby Ryan back in the lineup after missing 11 games with a broken finger and Kyle Turris returned after missing three games with a finger injury.
Tied 1-1 to start the third neither team seemed able to grab momentum, but Condon made a huge toe save on Nikita Kucherov midway through the period and went on to be even more impressive a couple minutes later as Tampa had multiple chances, but just couldn’t find a way to beat the Ottawa netminder.
Condon’s heroics had the 16,894 on hand at Canadian Tire Centre chanting his name and giving life to an otherwise lacklustre game.
Trailing 1-0 the Senators tied the game in the opening minutes of the second as Wingels fired a shot and beat Vasilevskiy stick side.
Both teams had a number of good chances throughout the period, but were unable to capitalize.
The Lightning opened the scoring just three minutes into the period as Point jumped on a rebound down low and had a wide open net.
Tampa nearly had a second in the dying seconds of the period, but Condon managed to reach back and stop the puck from crossing the goal line.
Notes: The Senators were without G Craig Anderson (lower body), RW Mark Stone (lower body) and D Mark Borowiecki (lower body). Tampa was missing C Tyler Johnson (lower body) and C Cedric Paquette (lower body).