TAMPA — After opening Saturday’s second game of the season with one of the worst first periods imaginable, the Lightning’s focus had to be on chipping away at a three-goal deficit.

The Lightning committed too many early penalties against the Devils and spent most of the period in their own end, unable to put together the passes to establish any semblance of offensive zone time.

They had only two shots on goal — just one in 14:33 of 5-on-5 time — in the period.

Still, the Lightning fought back to make it a one-goal game going into the third, and had a chance to tie the score on the power play early in the period.

But Nikita Kucherov’s soft pass on the man advantage was picked off by the Devils’ Jesper Bratt, who beat Andrei Vasilevskiy on a breakaway for a short-handed goal that served

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