Penguins Hold Strong Against Lightning, Take 2-1 Series Lead; Kunitz Suspension Coming? at BetLM

Penguins Hold Strong Against Lightning, Take 2–1 Series Lead; Kunitz Suspension Coming?

It wasn’t pretty and there will be a lot of things aside from the game that will be dis­cussed aside from the game, but Pitts­burgh earned a huge Game 3 win in a rough game with Tampa Bay tak­ing out the Light­ning 3–2 and tak­ing a 2–1 series lead.

Despite the Light­ning get­ting a pair of power play goals from Mar­tin St. Louis, Tyler Kennedy’s early third period goal broke a 2–2 tie and gave the Pen­guins a big win to take back home ice advan­tage in the series. Marc-Andre Fleury stood tall in this game mak­ing 25 saves and again pro­vid­ing the Pen­guins with the steady play in goal they needed to win.

What’s going to be talked about most in this game are a pair of dirty hits, one from each team. Pittsburgh’s Chris Kunitz caught Simon Gagne in the back of the head with a tar­geted and very pur­pose­ful elbow. Tampa Bay’s Steve Downie caught Pitts­burgh defense­man Ben Love­joy with a leap­ing blind­side check that put Love­joy down on the ice. Expect both play­ers to hear from the NHL in one way or another and cer­tainly expect to see both of them get hit with a suspension.

The Ver­sus panel of Keith Jones and Jeremy Roenick dis­cuss Kunitz’s elbow on Gagne after high­lights of the game.

TSN’s Bob McKen­zie reported tonight that both Kunitz and Steve Downie will have dis­ci­pli­nary hear­ings with the NHL tomor­row morn­ing to decide what, if any­thing, will hap­pen to them going forward.

That extracur­ric­u­lar stuff aside, the series has been just what we were expect­ing it to be: A tight-checking, phys­i­cally demand­ing and close series. Both teams are rolling with strate­gies that make their coaches look more like chess­mas­ters than head coaches. Fig­ur­ing out ways to break each other down and expose weak­nesses has become as big a pri­or­ity for both Dan Bylsma and Guy Boucher as lineup man­age­ment is.

Scor­ing isn’t easy in this series and fig­ur­ing out ways to make life bet­ter for their offense requires sneaky strat­egy. They’ll need to be more on the ball in Game 4 as both teams will likely have to make a lineup change with the non­sense from Kunitz and Downie.

What do you think Kunitz’s pun­ish­ment will be for his elbow on Simon Gagne? Will he escape pun­ish­ment the way Raffi Tor­res did or is he going away for a while? Let us know in our poll.

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