without coach Jon Cooper<\/a>\u00a0on the bench. Cooper, who led Canada to the silver medal at the Milan Cortina Games, will miss two games after the death of his father, Robert.<\/p>\nAssistant Rob Zettler stepped in for Cooper and the Lightning ended the Maple Leafs’ three-game winning streak.<\/p>\n
The Russian-born Kucherov got his 700th assist in his 855th NHL game, becoming the second-fastest player born outside of North America to reach the mark and trailing only Peter Stastny (784 games). The milestone assist came on Goncalves’ goal at 7:58 of the second period that gave the Lightning a 2-0 lead.<\/p>\n
Kucherov’s 30th goal came at 2:59 of the third and made it 3-0. His nine 30-goal seasons tie him with Steven Stamkos for the most in team history.<\/p>\n
John Tavares and Matthew Knies scored and Anthony Stolarz made 32 saves for the Maple Leafs, whose five-game winning streak against the Lightning was stopped.<\/p>\n
With Stolarz pulled to give Toronto an extra skater, Tavares scored with 3:41 remaining to end the shutout bid for Vasilevskiy. It came moments after Jake Guentzel missed an empty-net goal for the Lightning when his shot hit the post.<\/p>\n
After Point made it 4-1, Knies capped the scoring with 2:47 left for Toronto. Auston Matthews had an assist on the goal, tying Tim Horton for 10th on the career franchise list with 349.<\/p>\n
Up next<\/p>\n
Maple Leafs: Play at Florida on Thursday night.<\/p>\n
Lighting: Play at Carolina on Thursday night.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"TAMPA, Fla. (AP) \u2014 Nikita Kucherov scored to give him his ninth 30-goal season and added two assists…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":478033,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5105],"tags":[1249,2100,1251,62,5,189,40,4,1247,43,187,540,92,5168,5167,1953],"class_list":["post-478032","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tampa-bay-lightning","tag-app-sports","tag-app-top-stories","tag-associated-press","tag-florida","tag-hockey","tag-lightning","tag-news","tag-nhl","tag-orlando","tag-sports","tag-tampa","tag-tampa-bay","tag-tampa-bay-lightning","tag-tampabay","tag-tampabaylightning","tag-top-stories"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nhl\/116151364617664583","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/478032","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=478032"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/478032\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/478033"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=478032"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=478032"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=478032"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}