Carolina Hurricanes at Tampa Bay Lightning: Lineups and Discussion

The Hurricanes will look to avoid their first (gasp) losing streak of the season when they square off with the Tampa Bay Lightning at Amalie Arena tonight.

This is the first regular-season meeting between the two teams since the Lightning knocked the Hurricanes out of the playoffs in last year’s second round. Unlike last season, when the pair faced off eight times, this will only be the first of three meetings this season.

Coming off Saturday’s 5-2 loss to the Florida Panthers, it looks like the Hurricanes will again be without Brett Pesce and Nino Niederreiter, and now Antti Raanta as well, as he was knocked out of Saturday’s game against the Cats.

The Hurricanes will reunite the “SAT” lineup on the top line as they make a couple tweaks to their forward groupings. Here’s how Carolina will line up for this one:

Andrei Svechnikov - Sebastian Aho - Teuvo Teravainen
Jesperi Kotkaniemi - Vincent Trocheck - Martin Necas
Steven Lorentz - Jordan Staal - Jesper Fast
Jordan Martinook - Derek Stepan - Seth Jarvis

Jaccob Slavin - Ethan Bear
Brady Skjei - Tony DeAngelo
Ian Cole - Brendan Smith

Frederik Andersen
Alex Lyon

Injuries: Nino Niederreiter (lower body), Brett Pesce (upper body), Antti Raanta (upper body)

While (stop me if you’ve heard this one before) Tampa Bay is without Nikita Kucherov for an extended period of time, Carolina is well aware of how dangerous the rest of Tampa Bay’s lineup can be after the past year. Here’s how the Bolts project to line up for this one:

Ondrej Palat - Brayden Point - Anthony Cirelli
Alex Killorn - Steven Stamkos - Mathieu Joseph
Pat Maroon - Pierre-Edouard Bellemare - Corey Perry
Taylor Raddysh - Ross Colton - Alex Barré-Boulet

Victor Hedman - Jan Rutta
Ryan McDonagh - Erik Cernak
Andrej Sustr - Cal Foote

Andrei Vasilevskiy
Brian Elliott