TAMPA Bobby Ryan Jersey , Fla. (AP) —on trying to win another championship, not records and milestones along the way.Alex Killorn scored three goals for his first career hat trick, and the Lightning beat the Washington Capitals 6-3 Saturday night in the teams’ first meeting since last year’s Eastern Conference finals.Tampa Bay set team records for wins (55) and points (114) in a season, becoming the 12th team in league history to get at least 55 victories in a season. They need five wins in the last 10 games to become the third team to win 60.“We don’t look at records or anything like that, we are focusing on the end goal right now and doing whatever it takes to be ready for that,” said Tyler Johnson, who scored his 26th goal of the season. “That’s all those little things that we can work on and improve.”Erik Cernak and Yanni Gourde also scored in the Lightning’s fourth straight win, and Andrei Vasilevskiy stopped 30 shots.Alex Ovechkin scored twice to give him 48 on the season, John Carlson also scored and Braden Holtby finished with 29 saves for Washington. The Capitals remained two points ahead of the New York Islanders atop the Metropolitan Division.“Disappointing to end up with a loss like that,” Washington coach Todd Reirden said. “I thought we did some decent things as the game went on but our first period we didn’t manage the puck well enough to give ourselves a chance.”Killorn, who entered the game with 13 goals on the season, capped off the hat trick with an empty-netter with 47 seconds left. Gourde capped the scoring with another empty-netter 45 seconds later.“When the third goal seals the victory a little bit, there’s (47) seconds left but to go up two goals ahead at that point http://www.officialsenators.com/authentic-adidas-chris-wideman-jersey , it felt pretty good,” Killorn said.The Lightning jumped on the Capitals quickly as Brayden Point set up Johnson on a 2-on-1 at 8:35 of the first. Killorn made it 2-0 as he sent the puck from the boards toward the front of the net where it bounced off Washington defenseman Dmitry Orlov and past Holtby at 10:33.Carlson cut the deficit in half as a blocked shot bounced out to the right point where he stepped into a one-timer for his 12th at 12:06.Killorn answered that as he forced his way up the ice and outmuscled Michal Kempny for an initial shot before putting his own rebound with 4:04 left in the period to make it 3-1.“You (can’t) start like that against a team, a high-caliber team, they can get away,” Washington forward T.J. Oshie said. “That’s what it was, we were chasing from behind the rest of the time and it was all mental errors.”After the Lightning failed to convert on 1:28 of 5-on-3 power play time, 42 seconds of which carried over into the second period, the Capitals struck on the power play after Carlson’s shot deflected off Oshie in the high slot and landed right in the path of Ovechkin for a quick wrist shot to make it 3-2 at 7:33.Ovechkin got his 246th career power-play goal, tying Hall of Famer Phil Esposito for fifth place on the all-time list.Cernak regained Tampa Bay’s two-goal lead with his fourth of the season, coming open down the right circle before snapping a shot through Holtby’s legs at 2:45 of the third. Ovechik scored his second of the night off a carom from Orlov’s shot off the end boards to cut the Lightning lead to 4-3 at 12:56.The teams meet again Wednesday night at Washington.“I wouldn’t make too much of it,” Lightning coach Jon Cooper said of the win. “It’s two first-place teams going at it and you would expect the games to be good. We’ll get them in their building in a couple of days and it will be different, it will be round two under different circumstances.”NOTES: Lightning D Dan Girardi (lower body) and D Anton Stralman (lower body) each missed their third consecutive game after neither took part in the full morning skate. … Washington D Nick Jensen appeared in his 200th career game. … Tampa Bay D Mikhail Sergachev left the game in the first period after taking a hit from Washington RW Tom Wilson along the boards but returned to start the second. … Ovechkin has 655 career goals, one shy of tying Brendan Shanahan for 13th place on the all-time list. … Tampa Bay RW Nikita Kucherov had two assists and reached 117 points on the season Craig Anderson Jersey , the most since Sidney Crosby had 120 in 2006-07. Kucherov’s 82 assists on the season are the fourth-most in league history by a wing.UP NEXTLightning: Host Arizona on Monday night.Capitals: At New Jersey on Tuesday night. Two of the top four teams in the NHL are guaranteed to be out the playoffs after the second round.Goodbye Nashville or Winnipeg. Goodbye Boston or Tampa Bay. Thanks for playing.That’s the reality under the divisional playoff format that could pit the top two teams in the Eastern and Western Conferences against each other in round 2 after Pittsburgh and Washington were forced into that predicament in back-to-back playoffs.”There’s not a whole lot of logic there,” Capitals defenseman Brooks Orpik said.How’s this for logic? If ranking teams 1 through 8 in each conference like the old format that was in place from 1993-94 through 2013, the No. 2 seed is facing the No. 4 seed, 3 versus 7, and 5 versus 6 in the first round in the East and the West this year.A Penguins-Capitals style repeat could happen this year with the Central’s Predators and Jets on a crash course for a second-round showdown and the Boston Bruins and Tampa Bay Lightning locked into a stacked Atlantic bracket with the Toronto Maple Leafs.”You’d think that’d almost be a third-round series kind of thing, but so be it,” Predators defenseman Ryan Ellis said. ”It is what it is. You’re going to have to see a team like that eventually. There’s not much you can do to change it.”Maybe this spring will be enough to spark a change in the oft-criticized format in its fifth season that is agreed to between the league and NHL Players’ Association through the 2019-20 season. The Capitals getting knocked out in the second round by the eventual Stanley Cup-champion Penguins didn’t lead to much debate.”I would assume after his year there’d be a bigger appetite to do it,” Washington general manager Brian MacLellan said. ”In the past it hasn’t affected as many teams as might be required to get that movement. It’s basically been us that’s been the team that’s not benefited from the 1 through 8. But we’ll see what happens this year with a couple more really good teams being beat out in the second round.”Deputy Commissioner Bill Daly said the playoff format is not a burning issue for owners, wasn’t discussed by GMs and should be looked at over a long period of time instead of focusing on ”anomalies.””It’s worked I think for the most part as we anticipated it would work,” Daly said. ”I do believe in terms of the matchups in the first two rounds of the playoffs, they’re better with this format. They’re just more intense and more familiar with this format than they were in the old format.”Reigniting and creating new rivalries was the goal of this playoff format, which mimics the one in place for most of the ’80s and early ’90s. Inequities have happened, but so has plenty of drama on Cup runs by the Los Angeles Kings Authentic Erik Karlsson Jersey Kids , Chicago Blackhawks and the Penguins twice.”I think that as a fan, you want to see matchups against rivals,” said New Jersey defenseman Ben Lovejoy, who won the Cup with Pittsburgh in 2016. ”I think that that pits archenemies against each other more often and it can backfire every once in a while. You can get two high seeds playing each other in the first round or the second round and perhaps that’s not fair but I think ultimately it’s good for the game to have heated playoff series against teams that don’t like each other and see each other a lot.”Heated playoff series make this time of year fun, but Predators versus Jets and Bruins versus Lightning would be just as compelling, if not more so, in the conference finals. Hockey people reluctant to fault the system typically take an approach like Winnipeg GM Kevin Cheveldayoff, who said, ”Whether the format itself is right or wrong, if you want to win the Cup, you have to find a way to get through this format.”The difficult part is the format isn’t created equally, making one road to the third round or the Cup Final potentially easier than another.”I don’t necessarily agree with how it is, but it’s the way it is Jean-Gabriel Pageau Jersey ,” said winger Wayne Simmonds, whose Flyers open against the Penguins. ”You have to have a mindset that you’re going to play teams in your division first and foremost and that’s just the way it is.”Orpik said players can’t wait to revisit the format when the agreement is up, which could be part of the next round of collective bargaining talks. But there’s no consensus on what would be better – a return to 1 through 8, league-wide 1 through 16 or something else. The expected addition of a 32nd team in Seattle could spur change, too.”You can play a 1-to-16 playoff pool, but I would suggest to you that there’ll be inequities in that,” Predators GM David Poile said, referencing travel among the issues. ”Pick your poison. I think you change that and you come up with the next idea, you’d run into the same thing. … I don’t think there’s any exact playoff plan that everybody would say is perfect.”—