What a long day. The flight to Toronto was nice enough but immigration took longer than usual and traffic from the airport to downtown was such that it took an hour to get to the team hotel. Then had to work, and finally got something to eat on a rainy and cold night.

So, those are my excuses for not submitting something to this site earlier today.

There was much interest around the Lightning about a weekend report by Hockey Night in Canada's Al Strachan, who said owner Len Barrie was in the Lightning locker room during one of the games against the Rangers in Prague and started diagramming power play and penalty kill strategies.

Both Barrie and coach Barry Melrose said it did not happen.

"What a joke. I mean, come on," Barrie said. "We've got four capable coaches to do that. The day we don't think they are capable of handling that is the day I don't go into the locker room to diagram plays but to make a change (at coach)."

"Al is sort of a spaghetti salesman," Melrose said. "Al just throws so much against the wall and hopes something sticks. It's B.S. Al thrives on B.S. It's total lies."

Strachan said his anonymous source was a Lightning player. Asked if that bothered him, Melrose said, "Well, if it is, then the liar is in the dressing room. If that's the case, yeah, I'd be worried about that. But I can't worry about that. If a guy is a liar, he's a liar."

As far as practice on Monday, Melrose broke up Vinny Lecavalier's line, putting Matt Pettinger on the left wing in place of Vinny Prospal, who was centering a line that included Chris Gratton and Mark Recchi. ... Both Ryan Craig and Radim Vrbata, both out with groins, practiced and made the trip to Toronto, but it seemed unlikely either would play.