This should be fun. Looking for their first championship in more than two decades, the powerful Colorado Avalanche will attempt to stop the Tampa Bay Lightning from winning their third straight title when the Stanley Cup Final gets underway this Wednesday.
Kucherov missed another 32 regular-season games with a lower-body issue in 2021-22, while BriseBois cut even deeper. He was forced to say goodbye to his entire third line — free agents Blake Coleman and Barclay Goodrow, who had both made a significant impact after they were acquired at the 2020 trade deadline, and homegrown two-way center Yanni Gourde, who was selected by the Seattle Kraken in their expansion draft.
Tampa Bay finished out the regular season with 110 points — good for third place in the Atlantic Division and eighth overall in the NHL standings. The Lightning have opened all three of their playoff series this year on the road, taking down the fourth-ranked Toronto Maple Leafs in seven games before sweeping the league’s best regular-season team, the Florida Panthers, then getting the best of the Rangers and their elite goaltender, Igor Shesterkin.
The Lightning have gotten through their last two series without one of their top forwards. Center Brayden Point suffered a lower-body injury in Game 7 against Toronto. Second only to Kucherov in scoring by a Lightning player over these last three playoffs, Point has been on the ice, skating, and seems likely to return at some point in the Final.
Starting goaltender Darcy Kuemper played just 27:19 of Game 1 against Edmonton before pulling himself with an upper-body injury. He did back up Pavel Francouz in Game 4 and is expected to be able to play on Wednesday — but will coach Jared Bednar hand the reins back to Kuemper? In his six postseason games played, including three in Colorado’s first-round sweep of the Nashville Predators, Francouz is now 6-0.
One player who will not return is defenseman Samuel Girard, who suffered a broken sternum off a hard hit during Game 3 of Colorado’s second-round series against the St. Louis Blues.Despite all their success, the Lightning and the Avalanche share a common trait: neither Tampa Bay bench boss Jon Cooper nor Colorado’s Jared Bednar has ever won the Jack Adams Award as the NHL’s coach of the year.
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