Let’s get the good news out of the way first. All of the players that the Tampa Bay Lightning put on waivers on Wednesday cleared. Nick Abruzzese, Boris Katchouk, and Jakob Pelletier were all assigned to the Syracuse Crunch on Thursday. So, the waivers monster didn’t claim any victims from the Lightning. In fact, it was just the opposite as general manager Julien BriseBois claimed goaltender Pheonix Copley from the Los Angeles Kings.
Cue the “Andrei Vasilevskiy is on death’s doorstep” panic on social media. Look, we’ll acknowledge that it is possible that Vasy is dealing with something a little larger than the team is letting on. He was on the ice for the morning skate on Thursday and there are some rumblings that he’ll take to the net for Sunday’s final pre-season game, but let’s face it, until he’s stopping pucks in a full practice, there is going to be a little concern floating around Lightning nation.
So, yes, it is entirely possible that the 33-year-old Copley was brought in to work as a tandem with Jonas Johansson to start the season (in a similar fashion to a couple of seasons ago when Johansson teamed with Matt Tomkins to get through the first month of the season as Vasilevsky recovered from back surgery. There might be other, somewhat similar reasons involved as well.
First off, once you get past Johansson, the NHL experience among the Lightning’s depth chart plummets off the charts. There is a whopping one game of experience among Brandon Halverson (he’s got the game!), Ryan Fanti, and Harrison Meneghin. So, it’s possible that Mr. BriseBois felt the need to alter that, just in case either one of his NHL puckstoppers gets banged up at some point in the season. After all, Johansson has had his own flirtations with the injured reserve list over the last two seasons.
While Copley hasn’t had a ton of NHL action over the last couple of years (just nine games combined) he did appear in 37 contests back in 2022-23 for the Kings and posted a 2.64 GAA and .903 SV%. Not too shabby. In his career, the North Pole, Alaska native has a .898 SV% and 2.84 GAA in 77 games spread over ten seasons.
Could the Lightning roll with three goaltenders to start the season? Sure. Copley has a $775,000 cap hit that would fit into Tampa Bay’s available space. If they did start the season with three goalies, they could still carry a seventh defenseman and a thirteenth forward to bring the roster total to the maximum 23 players allowed. It’s not something they’ve done much in the past since Vasilevskiy has been the starter, but with a little more cap flexibility (and less reason to bank cap space throughout the season) maybe it’s something the organization is contemplating as their number one netminder ages.
File this one in the interesting category for sure.
