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Quick Strikes: The Tampa Bay Lightning celebrated their 13th anniversary of winning the Cup, and the Crunch celebrated a victory!

Posted on by loserpoints

The Bolts

Yesterday, the Tampa Bay Lightning celebrated their 13th “Staniversary.”

In honor of that event, Alexis Boucher of Lightning Shout wrote about the similarity between the Nashville Predator’s current run and Tampa’s from 13 years ago. “A non-traditional, Southern market has fallen in love with the game of hockey. It’s wonderful to see more people getting involved in the sport no matter where they live but there’s a certain amount of pride in seeing other Sunbelt teams succeed. There’s a familiarity to this as well. Look no further than the Tampa Bay Lightning’s championship win thirteen years ago today.” [Lightning Shout]

Raw Charge’s Matt was featured on Matt Hemriques’ vlog yesterday, talking about Tampa Bay’s protected list. [Raw Charge]

Geo wrote the Head-to-Head of Bolts vs. Blackhawks. “Despite the huge disappointment of a season for the Lightning, they were somehow able to put it together against the team that beat them in the Stanley Cup Finals two seasons ago.” [Raw Charge]

Dan Rosen of NHL.com addressed the rampant Jonathan Drouin rumors in his mailbag. His response was quite reasonable: “[E]ven if they save some money by giving him a bridge contract now, they could lose that and more if he blossoms and earns a bigger contract in two or three years. They can buy up some of that if they give him a bigger contract now.” [NHL]

Coach Jon Cooper hung out with the Lightning Made summer camp students in Ellenton yesterday.

The Crunch

Last night, the Syracuse Crunch won Game 3 of the Calder Cup Final by a score of 5-3. “This was the first game I have gotten to see Anthony Cirelli play for the Crunch. He impressed most of the night with his play. He showed that he had a lot of speed and was often outskating the opposition. He’s also not afraid to mix it up on the forecheck and threw some heavy hits. It’s also telling of what Groulx thinks of Cirelli that he was sent out for two shifts at the end of the game while the Griffins had their goalie pulled for the extra attacker.” [Raw Charge]

Matt Taormina is back for his second run at the Calder Cup. He reminisced with Bryan Burns yesterday. “Taormina is the lone holdover on the Crunch roster from the one that came oh-so-close to winning the American Hockey League’s version of the Holy Grail. In 2013, the Crunch fell into a 3-0 hole before winning the next two games. After two games of the 2017 Calder Cup Finals, the Crunch are down 2-0 and hoping to avoid a similar fate.” [Tampa Bay Lightning]

So this was awesome:

“Syracuse Crunch resumes their quest for their first championship” should be the subtitle of this article, but we’ll give Patrick Williams a pass for his Grand Rapids-centric narrative because he often re-tweets our things. [NHL.com]

Crunch goalie and video coach David Alexander was In the Booth yesterday with Dan D’Uva. [ESPN Syracuse]

Yanni Gourde also joined D’Uva. [ESPN Syracuse]

Two faces that a very familiar to Lightning fans are in Syracuse to cheer Tampa’s farm team on:

Stop me if you’ve heard this before: Staying out of the penalty box is a must for the Crunch moving forward. [Syracuse.com]

The City of Syracuse continues to show how much pride it has in its hometown team:

The Game

Ryan Stimson who founded the Passing Project and the Forechecking Project and is the best writer currently doing data driven systems analysis in the public sphere released his Magnum Opus yesterday. He presents a new way of approaching hockey tactics and strategy based on all of his data collection and study of coaching. If you enjoy systems work, we encourage you explore this. It might take a few sittings but the information reads easy and has lots of diagrams so don’t be intimidated by the length. This is the most impressively comprehensive hockey analysis work to be released in the last several years at least.

The Chicago Blackhawks have scored Jan Rutta. [SB Nation NHL]

Washington Capitals fans need this shirt:

There’s some new blood behind the benches for both the Utica Comets and the Chicago Wolves in the AHL coming up this season:

The Kalamazoo Wings are already ramping up their ticket packages sales:

The Los Angeles Kings take a page out of the Lightning’s playbook and sign a 30-goal scorer to a bridge deal.  Tyler Toffoli has a shiny new three-year contract that has a reasonable $4.6 million annual average value. [Los Angeles Times]

Do you enjoy video games?  EA Sports released a teaser trailer for NHL18.  It features a talented rookie who wears blue and white. Sadly it is not Brayden Point, but he’ll be in the game.

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Talking Points