Tampa Bay Lightning has taken a break in the upcoming schedule

Tampa Bay Lightning has taken a break in the upcoming schedule

TAMPA, Fla. — Midway through the NHL season, the Tampa Bay Lightning got off to a quick start, finishing first (with the Florida Panthers on 61 points) in the Eastern Conference. But things will slow down.

The Lightning will have a very light schedule for the next month with just eight games from now through the end of February.

“I think it’s a good thing for the whole team to take a break and relax, heal a little bit,” Lightning forward Ondrej Palat said. “The last two months have been crazy. There are so many games. We will need everyone who is in shape for these two months.”

The gap in the schedule was caused by the All-Star hiatus combined with a possible Olympic hiatus. But after the NHL pulled out of the Beijing Winter Olympics, those two weeks are now being used to reschedule games that have been canceled by COVID-19.

“It’s like you don’t worry about things that you can’t control, especially the schedule,” said Lightning forward Alex Killorn. “Schedules have changed behind the scenes so many times that people don’t know about it.”

Just as it became apparent that the Bolts had overcome the COVID troubles, star forward Nikita Kucherov entered the COVID protocols and will be absent for at least five days.

“I’m not worried. I’m not sure what the numbers are. It’s sort of the norm unfortunately,” head coach Jon Cooper said. “People understand, you’re probably gone five days then you come back. It’s unfortunate . If you get it, hope it’s during our break. Hopefully it’s not something that drags the boys down again.”

The Lightning only had three postponed games that had to be rescheduled — the lowest number of make-up games in the league.

The Bolts’ next game is Thursday night against New Jersey at the Amalie Arena.

The post Tampa Bay Lightning has taken a break in the upcoming schedule first appeared on Daily Florida Press.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Committee week in Florida’s Capitol: Welcome to the festival of ignorance

Image
Legislators came to town for the autumn ritual of political harlotry they call “committee week.” Tallahassee’s collective IQ dropped by a good 60 points. That’s bad, but what they propose doing to Florida is worse. Seems Sen. Joe Gruters, R-$ara$ota, who also is chairman of the Republican Party of Florida, was intimately involved with a plot to quash the Democratic vote. Remember that “ voting reform ” bill the governor signed on “Fox and Friends” last May? The one that restricts access to ballot drop-boxes, limits vote-by-mail applications, forbids giving people standing in long lines a bottle of water, and lets partisan poll watchers police canvassing boards? Even though Florida ran an immaculate election in 2020, Republicans goose-stepped in time with the Madman of Mar-a-Lago and claimed with straight faces they merely wanted to prevent election “fraud” — which is about as common as polar bears in Miami. (What fraud there was, was courtesy of the GOP .) Joe Gruters
Read more

Democratic governors press U.S. Senate to act on voting rights legislation

Image
WASHINGTON — Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and 16 other Democratic governors are urging the U.S. Senate to pass two bills that aim to protect voting rights. Both measures need 60 votes to advance under Senate rules but have been stalled by Republican opposition in the evenly divided Senate. “Without decisive action by the federal government this year to protect voters’ access to the ballot and ensure the integrity and transparency of our elections, the voices of Americans across the country, especially Americans of color, will be suppressed,” the governors wrote in a Monday  letter  to U.S. Senate leadership. Governors who signed the letter include Jared Polis of Colorado, Tim Walz of Minnesota, Steve Sisolak of Nevada, Phil Murphy of New Jersey, Michelle Lujan Grisham of New Mexico, Roy Cooper of North Carolina, Kate Brown of Oregon, Tom Wolf of Pennsylvania and Tony Evers of Wisconsin, among others. One bill, known as the  John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act of 2
Read more

U.S. House GOP would make it easier for feds to give public lands away to states

Image
U.S. House Republicans included in the new rules for the chamber they passed this month a provision meant to make it easier for Congress to give away public lands. The provision is a fairly technical piece of the 55-page  rules package . It affects internal House accounting and requires that anytime Congress were to give any federal lands to a state, municipality or tribe, it would not be counted as a loss to the federal budget. House Republicans had an identical rule when they controlled the chamber from 2017 to 2019. Advocates and critics agree the measure would be helpful to any effort by the House to transfer federal lands to states. But they disagree about the wisdom of such giveaways. Republicans and conservative groups see states as preferable stewards of most public lands. Those closest to the land are in a better position to make decisions on how to manage them than those in Washington bureaucracies, they say. Environmental groups and Democrats see federal divest
Read more