Lightning adjust to life without Victor Hedman, at least for time being

When the Tampa Bay Lightning learned Victor Hedman would be lost for three to six weeks with a lower-body injury suffered in a 5-1 loss to Calgary on January 11, a sigh of relief reverberated throughout the organization.
After all, when you're talking about the most indispensable players on the Lightning, Hedman and goaltender Andrei Vasilevskiy are probably No. 1 and No. 1A. And with the way Hedman was injured against the Flames and the difficulty he had even walking down the tunnel to the locker room, the worst was certainly feared.

But then you realize you have to play anywhere from seven to 17 games without your best defenseman and a guy that plays nearly 30 minutes a night in all situations and maybe that sigh of relief turns into more of a heavy sigh.
"In any situation like this, you're thinking, worst case scenario, 'Oh my gosh, he might be gone for the season,'" Lightning head coach Jon Cooper said. "And now you get the word that it's a month or whatever it is, and then you get selfish and say, 'Well, why couldn't it be two weeks?' But, we're happy that he's going to come back."
And that's the best news possible: Hedman will be back.
But how will the Lightning handle his absence in the meantime?
They set out to answer that question Wednesday in their first practice following a much-needed five day break for their bye week.
"I don't know if you really can," Cooper said when asked during his post-morning skate media availability how the Lightning will respond without Hedman in the lineup. "Let's be honest, nobody in that room's Victor Hedman. You can sit here and say, 'Well, everybody's got to chip in.' I guess they do, but it's not just the defensemen, our forwards, everybody because he's a big part of our offense. And so, we've just got to manage how we play the game. I think with Victor in the lineup, saying that, we still gave up 17 goals in the prior four games. I know Victor missed a lot of the last game, but still things were probably slipping a little in our defensive zone. That's just not a Victor Hedman, that's our whole team…Maybe this five-day break gives us a chance to reset a little bit and focus on a lot of the things that we need to focus on coming down the stretch here."

Certainly, the one defenseman who stands to benefit most from Hedman's absence is Slater Koekkoek, who has been a part-time player with the Lightning through the first half of the season, skating in 22 of 44 games, and, like Hedman, is a left-shot D with plenty of offensive ability.
He'll get the first crack at replacing Hedman in the lineup. During Wednesday's practice, he was on a top pair skating alongside Anton Stralman. Mikhail Sergachev and Dan Girardi were the Bolts' second pair at practice, and Braydon Coburn, Jake Dotchin and Andrej Sustr all took turns skating as a third pair.
"It's what I've waited for all year," Koekkoek said of his current opportunity. "Obviously, someone's going to get hurt at some point. We've been very fortunate that nobody has, well not long term at least. It's a hard situation. I love (Hedman) so much and hate to see him hurting, but we'll see how things go."

The onus of replacing Hedman won't just fall on Koekkoek's shoulders, however. A collective group effort among the defensemen as well as the Lightning as a whole will help steer the team through the difficult circumstances ahead.
"I don't think Slater's sitting there thinking he's replacing Victor," Cooper said. "We talked about that as a team. Anytime anybody gets injured, whether it was Girardi this year or we're missing Stralman or last year with Stamkos and Callahan, it's a team game. Do having those guys in the lineup make our team game a little bit easier? They do, but if there's anything we proved last year when we had a whole bunch of guys out of the lineup, we could still survive and prosper. This will be a test for us, there's no question. When you look at your goaltender and your top defensemen, those are pretty important positions. Sometimes if you lose a forward, you can kind of hide some situations, but once you start getting closer to the goal line, those are harder guys to hide. So we've just got to play as a team here. There's no question in my mind we can do that."