Lightning's Cooper after dropping 1st 2 games: 'This is a 5-alarm fire'

Jon Cooper thinks his once-heavily favored club is in a state of emergency after its latest defeat.

The Tampa Bay Lightning head coach conveyed as much after his team lost Game 2 to the Columbus Blue Jackets 5-1 on Friday, two nights after blowing a three-goal lead and falling 4-3 in the opener of the first-round series.

"The regular season's different from the playoffs," Cooper told the assembled media, including FOX Sports Florida, postgame Friday. "Things just happen so fast. It's zero-zero and there's a lot of excitement going into Game 1, and then, all of the sudden you're down 0-2 at home and alarms are going off."

Cooper acknowledged that Tampa Bay was rarely tested during a historically dominant regular season, but he tried to take a positive outlook on the club's predicament.

"Have we faced a ton of adversity this year? We haven't," Cooper said. "I've been in the league for six years, and it probably hasn't gotten any easier than it has this year. So now we've got some adversity, and teams face this all the time. And you face it in little pieces. This is a five-alarm fire, but it's adversity, and I don't know. Sometimes, that's good. Sometimes you have to go through stuff like this. We'll see how we respond."

Making matters worse for the Lightning is the fact that they dropped the first two games of the series on home ice, meaning the Blue Jackets will head home with a chance to earn an improbable series sweep.

Copyright (C) 2019 Score Media Ventures Inc. All rights reserved. Certain content reproduced under license.