After spending the week in North Carolina due to Hurricane Milton, the Tampa Bay Lightning will open the season Friday night against the Carolina Hurricanes in Raleigh. Faceoff is at 7 p.m.
Before Milton even organized into a tropical cyclone, the Lightning opted to evacuate so the could work out at the Hurricanes’ practice facility in nearby Morrisville. Families and pets were brought along.
Milton made landfall in the Tampa Bay area as a destructive Category 3 storm on Wednesday night.
“For us, there’s a bigger picture,” Lightning coach Jon Cooper said Monday after practice. “Like I told our guys, we've got to get away. There are a lot of people in our town who haven’t been able to get away. A lot of our thoughts are, ‘OK, hopefully everybody is going to be OK. What can we do when we get back to help everybody out that wasn't afforded the ability to get out like we did?’ ”
As far as hockey, the venue change made a difference.
“The guys were focused,” Coach Jon Cooper said. “I think we took care of a lot of the uncertainty of things these past couple days."
When they take the ice Friday, the Lightning will have some major changes in the lineup that finished 45-29-8 last season and lost to eventual champion Florida in first round of playoffs.
Long-time captain Steven Stamkos left for Nashville in free agency. Defenseman Mikhail Sergachev was dealt to Utah. Midseason additions last year, Anthony Duclair and Matthew Dumba, have moved on.
But they still have a star-studded nucleus that figures to help them remain among the NHL's elite teams. Nikita Kucherov, Andrei Vasilevski, new captain Victor Hedman and Brayden Point were all important components of Tampa Bay's back-to-back Stanley Cup championship runs.
General manager Julien BriseBois moved to bring back veteran Ryan McDonagh and dealt Sergachev for J.J. Moser to bolster the defense, and the team signed Jake Guentzel in free agency to replace Stamkos.
Vasilevskiy remains one of the best goaltenders in the NHL and is healthy after missing the start to last season following back surgery.
Kucherov had 100 assists and led the league in scoring with 144 points last season. Point scored a team-high 46 goals. With Guentzel (30 goals, 47 assists) plugged into a line their line as well as replacing Stamkos on the power-play, the Lightning figure to remain one of the league's high-scoring teams.
The Lightning and Hurricanes are scheduled to play again Saturday night at Amalie Arena in Tampa.
Information from the Associated Press was used in this report.
