The Hurricanes host the Lightning on Friday at PNC Arena with both teams sitting in third place in their respective divisions. Carolina comes into the game at 11-7-0 with 22 points, having won seven of 10. Tampa Bay has a similar point total with 23 but has lost more games than it’s won at 9-6-5.
1. We’re not even through 25% of the season and this will be the last regular season meeting between the two teams. The first two games, both in Tampa Bay, resulted in shutouts — a 3-0 Lightning win on Oct. 24 followed by a 4-0 Hurricanes win on Nov. 11.
Despite the opposite scores, Hurricanes coach Rod Brind’Amour thought his team played well in both games.
“The first game we were really good,” Brind’Amour said of the 3-0 loss after Friday’s morning skate. “We lost, but we didn’t give up much. We just didn’t score.”
The coach said the key will be keeping Tampa Bay’s power play off the ice.
“If you watch the Winnipeg game, they only had one power play,” Brind’Amour said of the Lightning’s 3-2 overtime loss at home on Wednesday.
2. Tampa Bay certainly has plenty of firepower on the power play, and Brind’Amour pointed out that the Lightning were without Nikita Kucherov, perhaps their best weapon, in the second game.
“They were missing Kucherov, which is a big deal,” Brind’Amour said. “And I thought the game was very similar to the first game, it’s just we were able to score. So we need to be able to do that with him in the lineup. … If we can find a way to not put him out on the power play, it’s going to help us. But he’s as good as a player is in the league.
“We’ve seen that this last stretch of games, we’ve been playing the top of the top, and he might be the top. I mean, he’s that good.”
During his post-skate availability, Tampa Bay coach Jon Cooper talked about surrounding himself with coaches who are smarter than him.
“The day I’m the smartest one in the room,” he said, “is probably when we’ve got an issue.”
I followed up by asking who is, and, without hesitating, he said Kucherov has the smartest hockey mind.
3. The Lightning having Kucherov in the lineup isn’t the biggest story of the night. Andrei Vasilevskiy, the 2019 Vezina and 2021 Conn Smythe winner, will make his first start of the season after undergoing back surgery two months ago.
The Tampa Bay goalie was a Vezina finalist four straight years from 2018 to 2021 and finished fifth and sixth in voting the past two seasons. He’s 12-5-3 with a 2.29 goals-against average, .930 save percentage and two shutouts in 20 career regular season appearances against Carolina.
“We’re obviously excited to have the best goaltender in the world back,” Lightning defenseman Victor Hedman said after the morning skate. “But it’s still been a while since he played a game, so we gotta do our best to help him out early on. But he’s a competitor. He’s obviously excited to go.”
4. Vasilevskiy last played April 29 — the Game 6 overtime loss to the Maple Leafs in the first round of the playoffs — and what better way to get back in the groove than facing the team that ranks second in the league with 33.6 shots on goal per game?
“Playing against a shot volume team like Carolina is probably a good thing for him to get a good start in,” Hedman said.
Cooper wouldn’t be surprised to see a lot of pucks thrown at the net by the Hurricanes, but he’s not exactly endorsing the idea of Vasilevskiy facing a lot of shots.
“If there’s a game you might see some rubber, this is the team you’re gonna see it against,” Cooper said of the Hurricanes. “But … we can’t sit here and say, ‘Well, Carolina shoots a ton of pucks and throws everything at the net’ and allow that to happen. Our job is to sit here and say, ‘Well, hold on a second here.’ We’ve got to get in lanes, we’ve got to get take away time and space.
“And the ones that do get through hopefully Vasi can stop. But just because we’re playing Carolina, it shouldn’t be a green light that oh, they’re gonna have 85 shot attempts tonight. That would be, you know, shame on us.”
5. There was also some question as to who Carolina’s two goaltenders for Friday’s game would be.
Antti Raanta exited Wednesday’s win over Edmonton after just 20 minutes, with the team calling the decision “precautionary.”
With Frederik Andersen already on the shelf, and Pyotr Kochetkov and Yaniv Perets — playing his first pro season in the ECHL — the only other goalies on an NHL contract, the Hurricanes would certainly need to add a goalie if they were to lose another.
When players came out for the morning skate, Raanta was among the first on the ice, and then he took the starter’s crease and will make his ninth start of the season. Raanta told me after the skate that he just had “a spasm” and credited the Hurricanes’ training staff with his quick recovery.
“We knew it wasn’t serious,” Brind’Amour said of Raanta’s exit on Wednesday. “He could have probably played, but we just — like we do now with every player — take precaution and took him out.”
Brind’Amour said the team is having “ongoing discussions” about adding a fourth goalie on an NHL contract — Jaroslav Halak had been with the team on a PTO but left this week without a deal — but it’s “not a concern at the moment.”
