- Max Crozier leveled Juraj Slafkovsky at 17:48 of the second period in Game 4 at Bell Centre
- The hit sparked a three-goal Lightning rally to a 3-2 win, evening the series 2-2
- Read below for Crozier’s reaction, the comeback that followed, and what it means for Game 5
The Tampa Bay Lightning roster has Nikita Kucherov, Brandon Hagel, Brayden Point, and Andrei Vasilevskiy. None of them changed Game 4 on Sunday. A third-pair defenseman did.
Max Crozier flattened Juraj Slafkovsky at 17:48 of the second period at Bell Centre, and the hit set off a three-goal rally that gave Tampa Bay a 3-2 win and evened the series with Montreal at 2-2.
Slafkovsky was caught with his head down. The 6-foot-3, 225-pound Canadiens forward went down hard, the building went silent, and the Lightning bench erupted.
Crozier had no problem ranking it.
“No. 1. Easily,” he told reporters, per NHL.com, when asked where the check ranked among his career hits.
Here is the hit:
Crozier called it a clean check that he timed up right. Tampa Bay had been trailing 2-0 and was 12 minutes away from going down 3-1 in the series. Then everything turned.
Jake Guentzel scored with 54 seconds left in the second. Brandon Hagel buried two in the third to finish the comeback.
“I mean, that is just a big-time hit and it got everyone into the game,” Guentzel said. “The bench really got fired up about it. Sometimes something like that can change a game.”
Watch the video of the hit and the rally that followed:
There was nothing routine about Crozier even being on the ice. The fourth-round pick from 2019 had played just one game since Feb. 1 because of a lower-body injury that required surgery. He had not played a single shift this postseason before Sunday.
Knowing Tampa needed bodies for what has been a physical series, Crozier asked assistant coach Dan Hinote for extra contact work. Lightning forward Conor Geekie obliged, taking runs at him at Bell Centre on Saturday.
It paid off less than 24 hours later.
Game 5 is in Tampa on Wednesday. The series is back to a best-of-three.
