Quick Strikes: A crafter of goalie masks (including Vasilevskiy’s and Ingram’s) needs help

The Headline

Sylvie Marsolais is one of the artists behind Sylabrush, a company that airbrushes goalie masks. Sylabrush is behind the designs on both Andrei Vasalevskiy’s and Connor Ingram’s masks. Marsolais posted on her Instagram this morning that their studio in Quebec City has been flooded and will need to be rebuilt.

Those wishing to help them rebuild can donate to a Go Fund Me campaign.

The Lightning

-Our yearly player grades marched on yesterday with TampaCuse tweener Jan Rutta.

With so much in flux on the Lightning blue line, he’s another one of the moving parts. Along with Anton Stralman, Dan Girardi, and Braydon Coburn, Rutta will be an unrestricted free agent this summer. The difference is that he’ll obviously be less expensive. With the Lightning needing to add at least two defenders this offseason, don’t be surprised if he’s an option to be re-signed.

-Is your mama a Tampa Bay Lightning fan? Mother’s Day is coming up, you know. Treat her right!

-Lightning forward Anthony Cirelli took some time to discuss his part in the upcoming IIHF Worlds.

The Crunch

-I wrote a meditation on hockey, the hockey community, grief, and love yesterday.

For many of us—fans, players, coaches, and staff—grief is at least a little bit involved in the end of every season because it’s gone. We’ve lost it, and there’s no possible way it can or will come back.

-One of the things I mentioned in that editorial was the Crunch’s series of sad media day exit interviews. A bunch more were posted yesterday.

First up, head coach Ben Groulx struggles to make sense of it all:

-Lightning prospect Alex Barré-Boulet is most proud of the way the team worked all season:

-Defenseman Nolan Valleau has a lot of pride in winning the North Division championship with the Crunch, and is happy with the chance he got with Syracuse.

-Rookie Boris Katchouk felt like the team stuck together and had some great depth that propelled them forward:

-Defenseman Hubert Labrie admired the way the team built on their rough start and was able to pull out a great regular season:

-Forward Daniel Walcott truly feels Syracuse is a second home, and it certainly sounds like the pending unrestricted free agent wants to be back:

-Many members of this close Crunch team will be at Cory Conacher’s golf tournament this summer. Here’s the info:

-Conacher has one year left on his contract with the Lightning. He talked about what he sees for himself next season in an article published yesterday.

“It’d be nice to play with them (the Lightning prospects) again, hopefully in the NHL instead of down here. But if I am at any point down here again, I’m ready to do the same thing and lead them in the right way and hopefully continue to win and go a little farther than we did this year,’’ Conacher said. “Syracuse always has a team that competes hard and plays hard. If I’m here next year, I’m sure I’ll be a part of a team that’s good and winning games. That’s how this organization puts together the farm team. If we can build off and learn from what happened this year and basically just look yourself in the mirror in the summer and be ready to go for next year, and hopefully it doesn’t happen again.’’

The Others

The Columbus Blue Jackets took a 2-1 series lead over the Boston Bruins last night with a 2-1 win behind stellar goaltending from Sergei Bobrovsky. Stanley Cup of Chowder has the recap.

Sigh. I’m having a hard time figuring out how I feel about this game. The Bruins weren’t terrible, Columbus wasn’t great. It came down to a bounce here, a post there. The frustrating thing is that the Bruins were the better team for the majority of the first period, and then completely fell apart on that Jenner goal. It just can’t happen, from the defense back to the goalie. The early lead allows Columbus to sit back and essentially play prevent defense. With a goalie as good as Bobrovsky in the opposing net, that’s not a winning formula.

In the late game, the Sharks also took a 2-1 lead over the Colorado Avalanche powered by a hat trick from Logan Couture. Head over to Fear the Fin for a game summary.

After a series tying game where the Avalanche’s stars took centre stage, tonight the Sharks responded thanks to a dominant performance from one of their own big names; Logan Couture.

Couture’s hat trick performance, which included the game winner with seven minutes remaining, led the Sharks to a 4-2 victory in Game 3, and whether they reach the promised land or not, it will undoubtedly go down as one of the greatest playoff performances in Sharks history.

-As Justin Dowling chases his NHL dream with the Dallas Stars, his pups are becoming minor celebrities. (pay-walled)

-The newest episode of Six Degrees of Mike McKenna is out! This week, Mike sat down with goalie equipment representative Todd Brown.

-The New York Rangers made a move yesterday, acquiring Adam Fox:

-Speaking of the Rangers, their prospect Olof Lindbom will play for Mora IK in Allsvenskan next season.

The Rangers selected the 6-foot-2 Swedish goaltender with the 39th overall pick of the 2018 Draft. He was the first goaltender taken off the board. Before the draft, he was the fifth-ranked European goaltending prospect by NHL Central Scouting.

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In Mora, Lindbom will be working with goaltending coach (and assistant general manager) Peter Iversen who has played a role in developing NHL goaltenders Linus Ullmark and Marcus Hogberg.

-Bray Ketchum is the new general manager of the Connecticut Whale of the NWHL.

-Speaking of women’s hockey, the dust still hasn’t really settled on the sudden disbanding of the CWHL. Ailish Forfar penned a story for Yahoo Sports Canada about it all.

When the CWHL announced they would discontinue operations in late March, it was a result of their business model becoming economically unsustainable. As players, we believed we had a successful league and that the future was brighter than ever for women’s hockey. We had fans at every game, we had our highest broadcast numbers to date and we were trending up on every social platform. All of this didn’t change the fact that in the end, the league had no money left to sustain another season.