Andrei Vasilevskiy is leading the charge as the Lightning surge up the standings

The Tampa Bay Lightning are one of the hottest teams in the National Hockey League — and a lot of that has to do with their star between the pipes.

With an 8-1-1 record in their last 10 games, the Lightning have improved to 42-26-7 with 91 points on the year. They’re just one point back of the Vegas Golden Knights in the league standings and nine points up on the final Eastern Conference playoff spot.

After being sidelined to start the season while recovering from back surgery, Andrei Vasilevskiy has returned to full form with a vengeance over the past few weeks. The 6’4″ Russian netminder is 29-17-2 on the year with a .901 save percentage — but, since the start of March, he’s posted a .918 save percentage in 12 games.

On Thursday’s edition of Daily Faceoff Live, Frank Seravalli and Tyler Yaremchuk welcomed Lightning insider Erik Erlendsson onto the show to discuss just how effective Vasilevskiy has been down the stretch.

Erik Erlendsson: The biggest thing with this team comes down to their goaltender: Andrei Vasilevskiy, who missed the start of the season with back surgery, so he missed the entire training camp. Basically, the first six weeks of the year were basically his training camp. So, his game is his game right now. He is making saves that, they don’t look great, but then you look at it and go, ‘Wow, that was a heck of a save.’ So, you’re getting a lot of those moments out of Andrei Vasilevskiy. He made a couple of stops in the second period last night, when they were up 2-1, when it was 3-1, when Toronto could’ve gotten back in the game, and he just shut the door, and that’s what Andrei Vasilevskiy does. Everything that I’ve said is all true, but at the end of the day, it’s the guy in net that makes the biggest difference for this team.

Watch the full episode here: