11/24/10 Rangers vs. Lightning

Hello again all you avid Rangers watchers, welcome to another pre-game article about the game tonight between the Blueshirts and the Bolts.

Tonight's game shall be an interesting one, and both the Rangers and Lightning are streaking teams right now. The Rangers are shooting for their third straight win while the Bolts are looking at their fifth. The Rangers and Lightning have a history of lighting up the scoreboard against each other as five goals have been scored by at least one team in each of their last four meetings.

However, looking at the stats of the Lightning lineup, all of the goals seem to be trending toward man: obviously Mr. Steven Stamkos. Stamkos leads his team, conference, and league with 20 goals in 21 games. Recently he has been the talk of potentially breaking the 50 goals in 50 games plateau. In my opinion, it is WAY too early to be thinking about that. While I do believe its possible for Stamkos to do it, all the talk happening when he still has 30 goals to score is jumping the gun. We've seen it done before. Last year when Ovechkin started scoring once a game he became the center of the league, and then he dropped off in the scoring chart. I'm not trying to put Stamkos down or anything, but hes going to have to ignore that talk, and do the work if he wants to get that record.

But in tonight's game, I feel that if the Rangers can do a good job of shutting down Stamkos like they did to Iginla two days ago, the Rangers could easily walk away with a victory. Also, Martin St. Louis needs to be watched and given no room to work, for he has 19 assists on the season so far (and you could probably take a guess where there all going).

Gaborik also needs to dig a little deeper. Hes our superstar coming off of a bad injury, and I know it takes time to get back in the groove after being away for so long. However, it frightens me that he could go into a bad slump and then try to do to much and it gets even worse (i.e. Ilya Kovalchuk)

My Diagnosis
I see this one being a little closer than the past one-sided blowouts that have taken place between these two teams. But ultimately, I feel the Rangers have a lot more momentum and depth than the Lightning have and that's why I think the Rangers come away with this one. Potentially in overtime.

My Predictions
Rangers win 5-4

Rangers Goals:
Final goal coming late in the third or in overtime by Brandon Dubinsky
Gaborik will have one goal.
Prust will also get one.
Anisimov will have a pair.

Lightning Goals:
Stamkos will get two. One at the start of the game and one at the beginning of the third.
Ryan Malone will also get one.
Final goal is up for grabs.

And I have one more thing I wanted to discuss. Since I'm starting to learn how to do more stuff on my blog, I'm going to try and incorporate more pictures and fun stuff into the blog to keep it interesting. But, I may fail on occasion so don't take it to heart if I do.

Enjoy the game everyone!