TAMPA, Fla. -- Kris Letang is tough. That's nothing new.
It was only the day after his stroke earlier in the season that he was asking Ron Hextall when he could get back on the ice, prompting Hextall to call him "one tough S.O.B." Two days after that stroke, Mike Sullivan said that it was a challenge keeping Letang off the ice.
Still, Letang will occasionally manage to amaze with his ability to battle through anything. His comeback after being struck by two pucks in the same play -- the latter leaving a trail of blood on the ice -- in the Penguins' 5-4 overtime win over the Lightning here in Tampa on Thursday was one of those moments that just makes you shake your head in amazement.
Letang was already hurting. He blocked a shot with his right hand and was battling to defend the Penguins' net-front, despite him being in clear pain. He wasn't able to put his right hand on his stick, but with the Lightning having possession in the Penguins' end, there was no opportunity for Letang to get off the ice.
Lightning forward Tanner Jeannot then took a shot that went straight into Letang's upper lip. The puck took a weird bounce off of Letang's face into forward Ross Colton and past Tristan Jarry to open the scoring.
Letang was face-down on the ice, and when he got to his knees he left spatters of blood on the ice in front of him, and a trail of blood all the way to the Penguins' locker room. The game was delayed as the ice crew came out to scrape it all up.
Letang, understandably, went back to the Penguins' locker room and didn't finish the period. It wouldn't have been a surprise if he stayed in there for the rest of the game, as bad as the injury looked.
Then, as if it were nothing, he was back on the bench early in the second period and back out on the ice for a regular shift. Between shifts, he sat on the bench with ice wrapped in a towel, held to his busted and swollen lip.
I caught Letang in the locker room after he was done speaking with the Penguins' head team physician, Dr. Dharmesh Vyas. His lip was looking pretty gnarly, and he showed me the finger on his right hand that was still wrapped up from the initial shot he blocked, saying that it got "cut open."
I asked Letang how his lip was feeling, and he shrugged it off.
"Right now it's just kind of numb," he said. "Tomorrow I'll feel a little bit of pain, but it's fine."
Totally nonchalant, like I was asking about a hangnail or a stubbed toe.
I asked Letang if he knew how many stitches he ended up needing in his lip, and he shrugged it off again.
"I think 24," he said before pausing. "That's a lot."
You think?
It's an absurd amount of stitches to get in your lip then come back out on the ice -- no cage, no full shield -- and finish the game.
"He’s a hockey player," Tristan Jarry said. "There’s nothing else really to say about that. He took a puck to the face and he comes back 20 minutes later. It’s unbelievable, I think it shows the character he has and how bad he wants to win."
I asked Sullivan if he was surprised to see Letang come back at all, given how bad things looked initially.
"I'm not surprised," Sullivan said with a hint of a smile. "He's just an ultra-competitive guy, he's tough as nails. I wasn't sure quite frankly how long it was going to take, because he's got a pretty good gash there. That took awhile to sew him up. But it doesn't surprise me that he comes back in the game. He's got a heart of a lion."
