Vasilevskiy injury will be difficult for Lightning to overcome

The Tampa Bay Lightning sustained their first big loss Thursday, and the season hasn’t even started.

Andrei Vasilevskiy, their all-world goalie, had back surgery Thursday morning, a microdiscectomy to address a lumbar disk herniation, and will be out for about the first two months of the regular season.

"We fully expect him to make a full recovery and for him to be back to being his old self," general manager Julien BriseBois said. "It's going to take some time."

Vasilevskiy is the Lightning's most important player. Time is not their friend, not with the competition in the Atlantic Division.

There are as many as seven teams in division that appear to be legitimate contenders to reach the Stanley Cup Playoffs, with the emergence of the Buffalo Sabres, Ottawa Senators and Detroit Red Wings, plus the Toronto Maple Leafs, Boston Bruins, Florida Panthers and Lightning, who all made it last season.

The Panthers got in last season as the second wild card in the Eastern Conference with 92 points. The Sabres had 91. So did the Pittsburgh Penguins. The Senators had 86.

Points lost early in the season are incredibly hard to find later, and the two things going against the Lightning with less than two weeks to go before the season begins are: 1) They won't have Vasilevskiy; 2) Their depth behind him is among the thinnest in the NHL.

Vasilevskiy is first in the NHL in wins (245) and second in games played (385) since 2016-17. The three goalies behind Vasilevskiy on Tampa Bay's current depth chart, Jonas Johansson, Hugo Alnefelt and Matt Tomkins, have played a combined 36 NHL games.

Johansson, who is 28, has played in 35, including three with the Colorado Avalanche last season.

Alnefelt, 22, is a prospect who has played one NHL game, with Tampa Bay in 2021-22. Tomkins, 29, played in Sweden the past two seasons, the American Hockey League and the ECHL before that. He has no NHL experience.

"For the time being we're going to go with the guys we have here," BriseBois said. "We still have five preseason games so that gives us time to get our goalies some reps, for us to get even more familiar with them and for them to get familiar with the players playing in front of them so they can read the play, anticipate and perform at a high level."

There are possible options for the Lightning on the free agent market to help them get through this time without Vasilevskiy.

Jaroslav Halak, who was the backup for the New York Rangers last season, is available. Brian Elliott, the backup to Vasilevskiy the past two seasons, also is on the market. There's Michael Hutchinson, who played 16 games for the Columbus Blue Jackets last season, and Aaron Dell, who played four games for the San Jose Sharks last season, too.

The Lightning are right up against the NHL salary cap but they will get short-term relief by putting Vasilevskiy on long-term injured reserve Oct. 10, the first day of the regular season, giving them the ability to exceed the cap by the prorated amount of his $9.5 million cap charge.

They must have the cap space available to remove him from LTIR when he's ready to play, but that may not stop them from signing someone to help fill the void.

"He's the best goaltender in the world and we're not going to go get a goaltender who can compare to him in the short term," BriseBois said. "But we think the goalies that we have here are able to get the job done and carry the load in the meantime. That doesn't mean we're not going to be exploring other options or that we haven't been exploring other options."

Will it even matter? At this point it's fair and right to question if the Lightning can stay in the race for two months without Vasilevskiy.

This isn't the same as losing a skater, even one as elite as Steven Stamkos or Nikita Kucherov. The difference when those players have gone down with long-term injuries is the Lightning still had Vasilevskiy.

They won the Stanley Cup in 2020 basically without Stamkos, who was limited in the playoffs to a few shifts in the Stanley Cup Final. But Vasilevskiy was 18-7 with a 1.90 goals-against average and .927 save percentage in 25 games, playing every minute of every game.

They went 36-17-3 in the 56-game 2020-21 regular season without Kucherov, largely because Vasilevskiy was so good, going 31-10-1 with a 2.21 GAA and .925 save percentage in 42 games.

He was the runner-up for the Vezina Trophy as the best goalie in the NHL that season. Vasilevskiy won the Vezina Trophy in 2018-19.

The Lightning have lost many key players from their championship teams the past several seasons, most recently forwards Alex Killorn, Pat Maroon and Ross Colton, and before them defenseman Ryan McDonagh and forwards Tyler Johnson, Barclay Goodrow and Blake Coleman.

They've carried on by replacing them. There is no replacement for Vasilevskiy.

He has played at least 50 games every full NHL season since 2016-17. He played 60 games last season, 63 the season before, 42 of 56 in the COVID-19-shortened 2020-21 season and 52 of 70 before the previous season was paused because of the coronavirus pandemic.

Now he's on the shelf until December, maybe later, and Tampa Bay's championship era is in jeopardy of ending.