It appears the 2023-24 Tampa Bay Lightning season will kick off not only with a Big Boi concert, but also with a big dash of adversity. On Thursday the team announced that All-World goaltender Andrei Vasilevskiy had undergone successful microdiscectomy surgery (good news!), but would likely miss the first two months of the season (bad news!).
In what will likely be a tightly contested Atlantic Division, not having the best player on the roster available until late November or early December is not exactly ideal. In his exit interview at the end of last season, Vasilevskiy had mentioned that his body kind of let him down midway through the season.