Tampa Bay Lightning: Happy Birthday, Cedric Paquette!
Hopefully, Tampa Bay Lightning center Cedric Paquette kicked off his weekend right as he celebrated his 23rd birthday.
The off-season is never a fun time for Tampa Bay Lightning fans. On the flip side, it is a pretty good time for hockey players. As most hockey fans know, there isn’t a whole lot of down time for players during the regular season, and things only escalate if their team is one of the lucky ones who secured a spot in the postseason.
The start of the off-season gives the players not only time to rehab their bodies and work on healing some of their nagging injuries, but it gives them time to spend with their family and friends, who more than likely haven’t seen very much of them over the course of the last few months.
Of course, there are some players who have other things to celebrate during the off-season. Speaking of celebrations, we know one Tampa Bay Lightning player who should be having a pretty good time this weekend. You see, August 13th is the birthday of our very own scrappy center Cedric Paquette.
Tampa Bay Lightning
Paquette turns 23 years of age today.
After the kind of performance the Quebec native put forth this season, we’d say he’s entitled to a bit of a break. Paquette played in 56 regular season games with the Tampa Bay Lightning this season. In that amount of time, Paquette was able to score six goals and five assists for a total of 11 points.
While his contributions to the scoreboard may not seem like anything to write home about, there are plenty of ways a player can make themselves valuable on the ice. Two of them are things Cedric Paquette is pretty darn good at; laying out hard hits and throwing the occasional punch.
Let’s take a moment to further explore the latter of those two talents. We take you back to February 9, 2016. The Tampa Bay Lightning were taking on the Montreal Canadiens at the Bell Centre in Montreal. We’re not exactly sure what started the fight, but it’s pretty clear how it ended.
Even after having the visor knocked clean off of his helmet by Nathan Beaulieu, Paquette was still willing to give it a go before the referees stepped in to stop the showdown. Paquette may not be the biggest guy in the world, but he certainly knows how to get the job done when the time calls for it.
Last season, Paquette spent more than a little time on the injured list. Unfortunately, some of these instances were through no fault of his own. On March 1, 2016, Boston Bruins winger Zac Rinaldo was suspended for five games for an illegal check to the head on Cedric Paquette. Needless to say, it’s kind of difficult to put your best foot forward when someone cleans your clock unexpectedly, and furthermore, illegally.
Hopefully, when the Tampa Bay Lightning’s 2016-17 season kicks off on October 13th at the Amalie Arena, right here in the Sunshine State, against the Detroit Red Wings, Paquette will have a little more luck in that arena and have an opportunity to spend less time on the bench and more time on the ice.
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For those of you who are counting the days until the start of the 2016-17 season, we are now just 61 days away from the first official puck drop of the season. That’s right, ladies and gentlemen…we are t-minus two months until the start of hockey. The real question now is…are you ready to Be The Thunder?