The Carolina Hurricanes enter Saturday's game in Tampa with an 0-1 record for the light hockey week. Saturday is the only other game, so it takes a win to score a breakeven week and continue a string of solid weeks. (Last week was 1-1-2 all on the road, and the previous week was 3-0.) By no means is this single game a season maker/breaker but it is important to keep momentum dial at positive even if it only by a small margin.
Per my notes/recap from yesterday's game which you can find HERE, the Canes' effort level and quality of play after the 5-day layoff was outstanding and deserving of a win. Only the lights out play of Caps rookie goalie Philip Grubauer and an opportunistic Caps power play stole the win that the Canes deserved. So the Canes enter Saturday's matchup against the Lightning looking not so much for a bounce back but rather a continuation of Friday hopefully with better results.
The Lightning are a different team this season. Minus Lecavalier who was bought out and now minus Stamkos for an extended period of time, the lineup and power play are less of a who's who of NHL scoring stars. But the defense is pretty good. The Lightning are getting scoring from different sources. And most significantly, the Lightning have finally found themselves a franchise goalie (for the 1st time since Khabibulin?) in Ben Bishop. Is Bishop in the mix for midway point Vezina consideration? At a bare minimum he is in the tier right below that group nearing the halfway point of the season.
Keys to the game from the Canes side:
1) Get ugly. Bishop covers a lot of net with his size, is playing well and is not offering up many holes right now. If he sees it, he likely stops it. If the Canes come out with back-to-back type of energy and skating legs and come into the zone 2v3, 2v2 or 3v3 and mostly settle for far out shots trying to beat Bishop, it could be a long night of shot after shot without anything to show for it and comments after the game by Tripp and John about how the team ran into another hot goalie. He has yielded only 10 goals in 6 games in December and 5 of those came in 1 rough outing (pegging his GAA in his other 5 starts right around 1.00).
The key is going to be getting the puck deep, so the Canes can get 5 in the zone and 1-2 to the front of the net. This game tees up nicely for exactly what Sekera has been doing in bunches which is a great combination of timing bodies to the front of the net with finding a small shooting lane to get the puck there.
Shorter verson: "Try to beat the goalie" shots count very little. Shots with traffic near the crease are the goal.
2) Continue Friday with patience. Friday's game was the Canes best 60-minute effort in at least a week and 1 of the better ones of the entire season. The key for the Canes is just to stick to it and not get impatient if it does not yield immediate results. The Canes generated plenty of offense Friday doing things the right way. Though it did not pay off Friday, it is the right path to the next win, NOT cheating to try to get an easy goal. I would be surprised if the Lightning are as porous defensively and yield as many breakaway chances, so it is a matter of sticking to it and capitalizing on a couple good chances.
Shorter version: The Canes need to pick up where they left off Friday in terms of play but also realize that it might not yield immediate/huge results and that they need to be willing to wait out a patient, grinding kind of game.
3) Sound defense. In the team's 1st meeting in Raleigh, the game was real tight with limited offense either way through more than half of the game. Once Tampa opened a lead, it put the clamps on defensively and cherry-picked opportunistic offense leaving the Canes to push harder and harder on the risk button that resulted in as much offense against as for. Ideal would be to score 1st and see if you can force Tampa to be the team chasing offense a bit, but if not plan B is to at least play well defensively to keep chances to a minimum and at least steer clear of a 2-goal deficit that puts Tampa in the driver's seat and allows them to settle into a game that they are very good at.
This game has Tuomo Ruutu or Tuomo Ruutu-like efforts written all over it. The Canes have enough players who have the size and skill to play the ugly goal game. The key is finding the skating legs, energy and will to do it in the 2nd half of a back-to-back versus settling for gliding into the zone and firing low-percentage shots without any traffic. If this game looks like last week's Vancouver game with a decent volume of shots of minimal quality early, I become concerned. If instead, it looks like the Canes to a man are signed up for battling for ice space and pucks in front of Bishop, I become much more optimistic.
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