Looking to follow up on their Game Four victory, the Tampa Bay Lightning will get back to work tonight at Amalie Arena for Game Five of their Eastern Conference Quarterfinal series with the Detroit Red Wings. Tonight’s tilt could be a defining one, as the teams are currently tied with two wins each.
After dropping Game One in Tampa, the Lightning have scrapped their way back onto even footing. Late-game heroics from Tyler Johnson and his Triplet pals in Game Four were ultimately enough to salvage what could have been a very ugly situation. The fact of the matter is that the Lightning are lucky to be where they are – this is now a best of three series, with two games scheduled to be played on home ice. Considering how dominant the Bolts were at Amalie Arena this year, it’s hard to be too upset with the situation.
Still, if Jon Cooper’s squad is going to take advantage of this positive situation, the skaters will have to be a lot better than they’ve been through four games in the series. Aside from a dominant performance in Game One, which resulted in a loss, the Bolts have been underwhelming. The team fans saw steamroll its way through the regular season has been absent for most of this playoff series. That needs to change.
The question now is whether or not Cooper will make any changes to his lineup. Will he stick with what worked in Game Four, or will he look to shake things up once again? The coach was fairly reserved about lineup decisions. However, per Joe Smith of the Tampa Bay Times, the coach was reasonably impressed by rookie Jonathan Drouin’s playoff debut:
Cooper said @jodrouin27 playoff debut might not have looked good on stat sheet (minus-2), but he actually "showed well."
— Joe Smith (@TBTimes_JSmith) April 25, 2015On the other side of things, Detroit head coach Mike Babcock announced that he will roll with the same lineup once again. That means Henrik Zetterberg and Pavel Datsyuk will remain separated, which creates havoc for the Lightning’s defense. With home-ice advantage on his side, Coach Cooper needs to take advantage of line matching.
I don’t have much time right now, so I’m going to leave things here. I just wanted to get a blog up so that there’s a place to chat during the game. Here’s hoping the guys give everyone at Amalie something to cheer about!
As always, thanks for reading.