- Cooper compared Game 7 to Team Canada’s Olympic gold medal loss
- Lightning eliminated in the first round for a fourth straight year
- Read below for Cooper’s full quote and how the night unfolded
The Lightning’s first-round exit hit Jon Cooper with a feeling he already knew too well.
After Sunday’s 2-1 Game 7 loss to the Canadiens, Cooper drew a comparison nobody saw coming. He thought back to February in Milan, where his Team Canada side fell to the United States in the Olympic gold medal game.
“As soon as that last buzzer went, that’s the feeling I had, I’ve seen this movie before,” Cooper told reporters, per The Athletic’s Arpon Basu and Pierre LeBrun. “All you can ask of your team, whether it was the Olympic tournament or a best-of-seven playoff, is to get better as you go. And I thought we got better as we went. I thought tonight we played our best game of the series. Sometimes you win the game and not the score. But it’s Game 7, there’s no moral victory in that.”
The arc lined up almost exactly. In Milan, Canada grabbed an early lead, the U.S. answered, and Jack Hughes ended things in 3-on-3 overtime. On Sunday in Tampa, Nick Suzuki opened the scoring, Dominic James pulled the Lightning even, and Alex Newhook batted a midair puck past Andrei Vasilevskiy with 8:53 left to send Montreal through.
Here’s a look at the goal that ended Tampa’s season:
Cooper said the room was quiet after, with not much left for him to add.
“It doesn’t matter what you say really,” Cooper said. “The words probably will mean something in a couple of days, but I think it’s just a lot of blank stares from everybody wondering how that one got away from us.”
Tampa is out in the opening round for a fourth straight year despite one of the better regular seasons in franchise history. The Bolts grabbed the second seed in the Atlantic and ran into a Canadiens team that managed only nine shots in Game 7, an NHL playoff record for fewest in a win.
That’s two heartbreakers in three months for Cooper. Different uniform, same ending.
Montreal moves on to face the Sabres starting Wednesday night.
