Any fans of the Tampa Bay Lightning who were holding their breath as they checked for news on Andrei Vasilevskiy can exhale. According to top NHL insider Elliotte Friedman, the star netminder will play Saturday’s preseason game and is expected to play the regular-season opener next week.
The auspicious news comes shortly after another potential scare. The Lightning had claimed goalie Pheonix Copley from the Los Angeles Kings earlier in the day. This move turned out to be a depth option.
Vasilevskiy has been missing in action for most of training camp and preseason, only recently being sighted at the rink. The reality likely is that something wasn’t quite right, and the Lightning chose to be better safe than sorry. That being said, there was good reason for fans to sweat a few bullets as time went on.
The team was without him for the first 20 games of the regular season after he had to undergo back surgery. At least this time around, he’ll have some semblance of a preseason, which he didn’t have when he returned from injury two seasons ago.
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Any version of this goalie between the pipes will be welcomed by the Lightning. We’ll have to wait and see how this missed time before the season impacts his play, but what matters is that they’ll get to find out.
Vasilevskiy is coming off a strong bounce-back season. He finished in second place in the Vezina Trophy voting behind Connor Hellebuyck, the first time he was a finalist for the award since he was a runner-up after the 2020-21 season. The 2018-19 winner has received Vezina votes in seven of his last eight seasons.
In that runner-up effort, he finished with a 38-20-5 record, a .921 save percentage and a 2.18 goals-against average. On the advanced metrics side, he had a 29.2 goals saved above expected, which was second in the NHL, according to MoneyPuck.
