Just the Facts
- The Time: 6:30pm EST
- The Place: Raymond James Stadium, Tampa, Florida
- Place to Watch: ESPN
- Place to Listen: 98.5 The Sports Hub
Game Preview
The Bruins have managed to slightly solidify their place in the Eastern Wildcard lately with a series of stout wins over their last 10 games that have featured both the depth and the main players putting
in maximum effort to get two points. They aren’t completely out of the woods yet, and they definitely shouldn’t consider themselves contenders, but they should take the lessons from the games they’ve played over the last month and bring them here ready to be applied.
Especially because it brings me absolutely no joy to inform you their foes tonight; the Tampa Bay Lightning, did the thing where they started slow and came back from the dead. Again.
While they still have some trouble with teams from Ohio, the Lightning have been absolutely crushing their competition; 8-1-1 in their last 10, have shot straight back into the Top 5 of the NHL in expected goals for per 60 minutes. Jon Cooper’s system has given the Lightning near uncontested control of the middle of the ice, and it’s paying dividends; Nikita Kucherov going at a preposterous pace that has him 3rd in the league in points, and he’s brought Jake Guentzel and Brandon Hagel along for the ride. Oh yeah, and Andrei Vasilevskiy appears to have remembered he’s actually one of the best goaltenders on the planet again. This is going to be a brutal but important test for the B’s, as the only way to avoid the Bolts in the playoffs right now is either not making them (which is becoming increasingly unlikely), or leapfrog Montreal and Buffalo.
Oh yeah, and today they’ll be playing this game out of doors in some of the worst jerseys I have ever seen with my own two eyes. Oh good god are they bad. Just awful, and the outdoor games have had some clunkers. I even like the idea of color-vs.-color games! Hell, now that like 90% of TVs in North America are 1080p, we ought to do way more! Just not like this!
Regardless of how you feel about these outdoor games (personally I feel the Heritage Classic/Winter Classic should just trade off every other year and the Stadium Series should book end the regular season, but that’s just me), the biggest things to watch out for, even with the big tarp they put up over the ice…is that the ice suffers. Even in optimal conditions where the temperature behaves itself, the exposure to a live environment will create imperfections on the ice that are imperceptible to a person watching it at first, and the puck seems to take on the properties of a superball. Further, even seasoned skaters struggle with the unique profile of the ice after being exposed to the elements for even a little bit, so the first team that manages to get the puck to do what they want and also figures out how to best navigate the unfriendly ice tends to be the winner. Sometimes both teams figure things out and it becomes a classic, but more often than not these games are blowouts. Boston is, thankfully, very used to these kinds of games; being 4-1-0 in outdoor contests and notably skunked the Flyers in their most recent trip to a place with decent weather.
It’s up to these Bruins, who feature almost none of the players who were part of the most recent excursion out doors, to defend that pedigree once again in the house built by linemen and corners. Fittingly, it will involve their own defense coming ready to play, because the alternative is hearing that goddamn pirate ship shoot blanks all night.
Who wins? We find out together.
