Brandon Hagel needed less than two minutes at the end of the third period to turn a tied road game into a hat trick.
Hagel scored the go-ahead goal at 18:16 of the third and an empty-netter at 18:37, finishing with three goals and an assist in the Tampa Bay Lightning's 5-3 win over the New York Islanders on Saturday at UBS Arena. It was his fourth NHL hat trick and his third with Tampa Bay, NHL.com reported.
Jake Guentzel scored twice, and the Lightning (4-1-0) won their fourth straight.
"It's a good feeling for the group," Hagel said, per NHL.com. "Obviously, not everything's the same here in this group. We've got new players, and you want to be able to build some confidence within the team, within the group, and doing that early into the season is a big part of that."
Two early, then a second-period slide
Guentzel opened the scoring at 5:45 of the first after a Jean-Gabriel Pageau turnover. Hagel made it 2-0 at 15:42, taking a Victor Hedman feed through the neutral zone, cutting across the crease and beating Ilya Sorokin high blocker side. ESPN's box lists Hagel with six shots, a plus-2 and 21:32 of ice time.
New York answered in the second. Tony DeAngelo cut it to 2-1 from the point. Guentzel restored a two-goal lead on the power play at 7:54 - Hagel drew an assist on that goal from the slot feed chain with Nikita Kucherov - before Matthew Schaefer and Brayden Schenn tied it 3-3, Schenn's power-play tip banking in with 6.1 seconds left in the period.
