BROSSARD \u2013 If there\u2019s one player who never backs down from a physical battle, it\u2019s Arber Xhekaj.<\/p>\n
And as the First Round series shifts to Montreal, where the intensity is only expected to rise, the hard-nosed defenseman is more than ready for whatever Tampa throws the Canadiens\u2019 way in Game 3.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s great. It feeds right into my game,\u201d Xhekaj told the media on Thursday. \u201cThat\u2019s the game I like to play, and it falls right into my hand. [\u2026] We\u2019re here, we\u2019re ready for whatever they have to offer us. We have big bodies; we have guys who like to play a rough role and we\u2019ll keep going.”<\/p>\n
Xhekaj was one of 24 players on the ice at the CN Sports Complex for Habs practice on Thursday. Forward Josh Anderson and defenseman Mike\u00a0Matheson were given therapy days and did not take part in the session.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"BROSSARD \u2013 If there\u2019s one player who never backs down from a physical battle, it\u2019s Arber Xhekaj. And…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":623816,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[194292],"tags":[49,48,2338],"class_list":{"0":"post-623815","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-montreal","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-montreal"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/623815","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=623815"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/623815\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/623816"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=623815"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=623815"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=623815"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}