Tampa Bay Lightning at Columbus Blue Jackets
The Lightning are coming off their biggest offensive output in eight games with a 6-3 win over Philadelphia on Saturday afternoon. Despite that being their top scoring game in eight games, they still have 26 goals scored over those last eight contests, which is a lot of consistent scoring for a team missing arguably the NHL’s top goal scorer.
The Jackets are coming off a 6-3 win in Winnipeg, a win that essentially sealed the fate of Winnipeg coach Claude Noel. That game marked back-to-back regulation wins for the Blue Jackets, and after losing 11 of their first 16 games of the season (all in regulation, so no extra points), Columbus can put themselves within two points of a playoff spot with a win tonight.
Tampa Bay has been getting contributions from a lot more than just Martin St. Louis: Ondrej Palat has points in eight of his last nine games (10 overall); Nikita Kucherov has three goals in his last six games; Tyler Johnson has four goals and seven points in his last nine games. This team has done a marvelous job of getting goals from all of its top nine forwards and that’s helped push them to two points out of first in the Atlantic Division.
Columbus’ goal scoring worries me tonight; they are shooting 13.5-percent as a team over their last three games and 18-percent as a team over their last two, both are rates that are much too high to sustain for more than a handful of games. They do get to face Anders Lindback, though, so this is a game where I’d take a lot of skaters and neither goalie.
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Top RW Value |
Top LW Value |
Top C Value |
Top D Value |
Bargain Bin |
|
(TBL) $8950 |
(CBJ) $7050 |
Tyler Johnson (TBL) $8200 |
(CBJ) $9550 |
Nate Thompson $5000 |
