For just about any club in the league, the news that their clear No. 1 goalie is out for a couple months following back surgery would be a huge problem.

For the Tampa Bay Lightning, whose clear No. 1 goalie is also a consistent top-tier netminder in the league and whose clear backup is a bottom-of-the-barrel netminder, in the toughest division in the sport? It's potentially disastrous.

Let's ballpark it and say the season starts two weeks after Andrei Vasilevsky's surgery. That means his potential return is in early-to-mid-December, at which point the Lightning will have played, god, 30ish games. On September 28, when the Lightning made the announcement that Vasilevskiy would be out 10-to-12 weeks. If that's the exact timeline, "10 weeks" means he would be able to return right around December 7, coincidentally the day the Lightning wrap up a home-road back-to-back against the Nashville Predators and start a five-game road trip. But that game visiting the Predators is also the 28th on the Lightning's schedule. For 12 weeks, he won't be back until after the Christmas break, at which point Tampa will have played 35 games.