Wednesday, December 21, 2016

Two Keepers Head to IR After Same Game

You can definitely chalk up this strange occurrence as something you don't see very often... the two starting goalies in one game getting hurt... bad enough to both land on the Injured Reserve the next day.

Both the Detroit Red Wings and Tampa Bay Lightning lost the services of their starting goalies on the night, Jimmy Howard and Ben Bishop, both suffering lower-body injuries, as goalies most often do.

The Red Wings expect Howard to be out for a while, not exactly giving a timetable to his return, but likely expecting something greater than the minimum 7 days that he has to be on the list.  He will undergo more testing back home and for now, Jared Coreau will be the back-up for Petr Mrazek going forward.

The Lightning, on the other hand, have already said that they expect Bishop to be out for 3-to-4 weeks moving forward and that is certainly a little more tangible than the wait-and-see attitude of the Wings.  Kristers Gudlevskis has already been called up to back up Andrei Vasilevskiy, bringing back one of the best duos, in terms of spelling mistakes.

In the pool, this is certainly a bigger blow to Benson in 1st place, who may not have taken a whole lot of points out of Howard, 12 points in total, but defending the top spot needs everyone to be healthy at the time.  His team has opened up a bit more of a gap this week, back up to 12 points, but if this is a 4-week injury, it could hurt the overall totals.

Dale C., down in 21st place, has lost his number one goalie for about a month and his goalie points would have to come from the inconsistently starting Kari Lehtonen in Dallas.  I'm thinking Dale should have gooned it up at the first Waiver Draft.

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