The Tampa Bay Lightning are ready to get back to work, as they are scheduled to take on the Carolina Hurricanes tomorrow night at PNC Arena. ‘Scheduled’ is the operative word in that sentence. Due to postponements attributable to the COVID-19 pandemic, the game – if it indeed goes ahead - will come following four days off for the Bolts. It will mark only their fifth contest of the season.
Because they’ve been at the mercy of COVID scheduling issues to start the year, it’s incredibly difficult to get any sort of read on where this Lightning team is at right now. They looked great against the Chicago Blackhawks, but slowly fell apart before catastrophically imploding against the Columbus Blue Jackets. Are we getting the team that beat Chicago 5-1 on opening night, or the one that lost 5-2 to Columbus last weekend? It’s tough to say.
What we can say for almost certain, though, is that Carolina represents the best opponent that the Lightning will face in the Central Division this season. Even though they technically sit at the bottom of the standings right now (games played being the major driver there), this is not a team that can be taken lightly. For the Lightning, that means they will need to put their best foot forward if they want to grab a victory; the effort level against Columbus on Saturday simply can’t be repeated.
Grabbing that victory may be made more difficult by the injury situation facing Jon Cooper’s club. While the volume of injuries isn’t material, the significance of them is. Erik Cernak remains listed as day-to-day, while backup goaltender Curtis McElhinney is expected to stay in COVID protocol until the weekend, per Erik Erlendsson of LightningInsider.com. Mitchell Stephens also remains out indefinitely. The Cernak injury, in particular, is a major concern for a Lightning team that quite frankly isn’t all that deep on the back end. When fully healthy, the blue line is fine; when even one body goes down, it’s a different story. To get a sense of how much weaker the Lightning blue line looks with someone like Cernak out, consider yesterday’s practice lineup:
Line rushes:
— Lightning Insider (@Erik_Erlendsson) January 25, 2021
Palat-Point-Stamkos
Killorn-Cirelli-Johnson
Goodrow-Gourde-Coleman
Maroon-Joseph-Volkov
Smith
Hedman-Rutta
McDonagh-Foote
Sergachev-Schenn
Borgman
Vasilevskiy
Gibson
Against a quality opponent like Carolina, the Lightning are going to need everybody at their best. Having Cal Foote continue to move forward on his development trajectory would go a long way in ensuring that this Bolts squad can cope with an injury to someone like Cernak. Let’s see what tomorrow brings.
As always, thanks for reading.