TAMPA, Fla. — Boston Bruins Coach Claude Julien had a gut feeling about Jimmy Hayes and was right.
Hayes scored in the 10th round of a shootout, Tuukka Rask won his sixth straight game to start the season and the Bruins beat the Tampa Bay Lightning 4-3 on Thursday night.
“Jimmy Hayes is a pretty good shooter,” Julien said. “He’s one of those guys that has a quick release. I felt good about putting him out there. He didn’t disappoint.”
Hayes entered 0 for 4 in shootouts and has gone 26 games without a goal in regulation.
Tampa Bay’s Brayden Point and Boston’s Riley Nash both scored in the fourth round, but Rask and Andrei Vasilevskiy were strong during the shootout as Boston won 2-1.
Brandon Carlo, Ryan Spooner and David Pastrnak scored in regulation for the Bruins, who finished a 3-1 trip.
“Start a little streak on the winning side of things is a lot more fun for us,” Carlo said. “Plane rides are a lot better back.”
The Lightning got two goals from Tyler Johnson. Victor Hedman had the other Tampa Bay goal in the team’s first home game since a 3-3 trip.
“Clearly, it’s troublesome,” Coach Jon Cooper said about Tampa Bay falling behind 2-0. “I thought when the guys got their legs, I thought they played well enough to win the game.”
Johnson redirected Braydon Coburn’s shot past Rask to tie it 3-all 10:04 into the third period. The goal stood after a video review showed Johnson didn’t score with a high stick.
Rask stopped 27 shots. He has Boston’s longest winning streak to begin a season since Tim Thomas went 8-0 in 2010-11.
Carlo beat Vasilevskiy from along the goal line at 4:01 of the first before Spooner made it 2-0 on the Bruins’ third power-play goal of the season with 9:13 left in the period. Tampa Bay challenged that Boston was offside before Spooner’s goal, but a video review proved inconclusive.
Cooper thought the play was offside.
“We shouldn’t have been down 2-0,” he said.
Vasilevskiy made 28 saves.
Hedman scored on a power play late in the first.
After a video review determined that Tampa Bay’s Ondrej Palat illegally kicked the puck into the net early in the second, Pastrnak’s sixth goal gave Boston a 3-1 lead 3 minutes later.
Johnson’s power-play goal pulled Tampa Bay to 3-2 midway through the second.
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