7:01PM: Kakko will not play due to the flu. (NYR)
6:04PM: David Quinn said that the Rangers have some players battling the flu so they won’t know the lineup until after warmups. (NYR)
3:30PM: The Rangers (8-6-2) face the Tampa Bay Lightning (8-5-2) on Thursday in Tampa.
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The Rangers beat Tampa 4-1 on 10/29 behind goals from Kaapo Kakko, Filip Chytil, Adam Fox and Ryan Strome with Alex Georgiev stopping 29 of 30 shots.
Georgiev will start in net on Thursday.
The Rangers are 6-2-2 in their last ten and have the following streaks going:
- Artemi Panarin: 9 game point streak (4 goals, 9 assists)
- Adam Fox: 5 game point streak (2 goals, 4 assists)
- Tony DeAngelo: 5 game point streak (1 goal, 5 assists)
- Pavel Buchnevich: 4 game point streak (6 assists) and 14 points in the last 15 games
- Filip Chytil: 3 game point streak (2 goals, 1 assist)
- Kaapo Kakko: Goals in two straight games
- Ryan Strome: 5 goals, 11 assists in the past 14 games.
Tampa is 6-3-1 in their last 10 but has not played since Saturday when they played the second of two games against Buffalo in Sweden.
At Tampa’s practice on Wednesday, Kevin Shattenkirk was paired with Victor Hedman and Ryan McDonagh was paired with Erik Cernak.
Adam Rotter: The Rangers played their best game of the season, up to that point, against Tampa with a pretty complete, save for the bad change that allowed Kucherov to score, 60 minute effort. The Rangers have to hope for something similar tonight, along with strong goaltending from Alex Georgiev, or at least not a repeat of Tuesday where they dominated one period and got dominated the next. The Lightning are at home for the first time in a while and with time off after returning from Sweden, they should be expected to come out strong in the first period and the Rangers have to be ready and counter when they can.
It will be interesting to see if Micheal Haley slots back in for a possible rematch against Patrick Maroon or if the Rangers feel Haley can have more of an impact than Greg McKegg or Lias Andersson. Hopefully this is the second to last game where the Rangers will be without Mika Zibanejad, but we will have to wait and see on that.