Time: 3:00 PM EST
Place: Little Caesars Arena
TV: BSDET, BSFL, SN1
Radio: 97.1 FM The Ticket/1270 AM
Lightning Blog: Raw Charge
Detroit heads into the penultimate weekend of their season welcoming the Tampa Bay Lightning for the first time in a month. The last time these clubs met it was in Florida for back-to-back weekend afternoon games so we’ll do that again.
Honestly, a similar result would be pretty cool. The Wings have an outside chance to actually win the season series. To do so, Detroit would need regulation wins on both days, so don’t count on that, but we’ve got the rest of the weekend to worry about realities. Let’s spend a minute on a Saturday morning dreaming of possibilities.
Fortunately, Detroit’s inability to even compete on the ice with Tampa seems to be improving. After dropping the first two games of the season series, Detroit has gone 2-1-1 against the Bolts since then. Again, that’s a team probably looking past the Wings by a lot, but I don’t care. Winning is winning.
The downside to the plan here is that in Tampa’s six remaining games, they’re likely going to be pushing really hard to get back atop the Central Division standings. Tampa sits one point behind Florida for 2nd and three points behind Carolina, but has two games in hand on the Panthers. At the very least they’re going to want home ice against their in-state rivals, but if they can slide into that top spot and draw whichever hot mess team claims the fourth seed by the time we’re all done here, they’re definitely going to want to push for that.
No big roster or injury news since the last game so we might be looking at the same 11-7 lineup that lost on Thursday. Adam Erne remains on the COVID Protocol list and Danny DeKeyser’s kicked nuts seem fine.
No GDU today with the earlier puck drop, but we’ll drop updates in here as we see them. LGRW.