This is the Jeff Merrick Show on the SportsNet Radio Network.

Welcome back.

Matt Marquesian for Jeff.

He's under the weather.

He's been, whatever has been going around seemingly from two months now,

Jeff is the lucky recipient of that now. Hopefully Jeff will be back in this chair,

well, not this chair specifically, but hopefully he'll be back tomorrow. If not,

well, it'll be me again. Lucky for you, Lance.

The Tampa Bay Lightning staved off elimination with a 6-3 win against the Panthers on Saturday.

And it saw the return to the lineup of a player that, frankly, I did not think that we were going to see the rest of the season.

So it's remarkable that he's back to talk about that and more about this series. Dave Randorf, Tampa Bay Lightning, play-by-play voice. Dave, how are you today? I'm good, Matt. I'm glad to be on with you and I hope Jeff's feeling better soon. Well, like Elliot said, he thinks I planted something on Jeff so that I could get this chair for today. But I mean, I would never do

such a thing. I may cut his power in Stoville, but I would never give him illness. That would be

crazy. That would be pretty nasty indeed. Yeah. So, you know, we saw, we saw Tampa Bay the six

three win against the Panthers. They avoid the sweep. Mikhail Sergachev back in the lineup.

Played just over 17 minutes. First game since February 7th. What did you see from Surgachev in game one? Like there was no hesitation. That's the one thing that I always am concerned about with a player coming back from an injury like he have is that little bit of hesitation. But didn't look worse for wear in that one. What did you make of Sir Gitchev's

return? Well, it was, it provided a couple of things. First of all, you know, you get one of your

top defensemen back in the lineup. And listen, they had planned to have him back if they went on,

you know, if they kept winning here in the playoffs. We kept hearing that they had to get past the first round. But they were planning to, you know, obviously they want to think towards getting towards at least the first second or maybe third round. They want to make his deeper run as they can. And so they were planning to have him back at some point. So he's got to get in there at some stage. The doctors had cleared him and there was no further, you know, risk of him, you know, damaging the leg any further

physically. It was just the mental hurdle. So once they decided that that was good to go, you get

one of your Todd defensemen back in, but it was also the emotional lifts that was provided here

for the players in the

room and on the bench and in the building.

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