What went wrong for the Panthers in their disastrous first period against the Stars
Paul Maurice took more than five seconds to think, trying to come up with a way to fully explain what happened in an uncharacteristically disastrous opening period for his Florida Panthers on Thursday.
It almost didn’t matter as the Panthers, in their usual comeback-happy manner, nearly stormed from behind against the Dallas Stars, but their rally fell short and it did. The ugliest period of Florida’s season was costly in a 6-4 loss and it was hard to describe just how awful it was.
“There’s just too many small pieces,” the coach said Thursday.
For 20 minutes, the Panthers bled breakaways and odd-man rushes, and the Stars kept cashing in. They took a 4-0 lead into the second intermission, and it was too much for Florida to overcome. The Panthers lost in Sunrise for the second time in three games.
The final numbers for the opening period were gruesome: 11 shots for Dallas and four goals; two power plays for Florida and one shot. Florida benched star goaltender Sergei Bobrovsky after the first and got within a goal with 6:04 remaining, but the hill was too steep to climb.
It was easily the worst period the Panthers (9-7-1) have played this year — “We haven’t had those starts, so that’s not our team,” Maurice said — and they believe it was an aberration. At the same time, it was a reminder of what the defense could look like when it was at its worst last season and what Maurice was hoping to iron out of Florida’s game.
“We realized that that’s a period we can learn from,” star defenseman Aaron Ekblad said Thursday, “and we’ll be better because of it.”
What exactly went wrong? Maurice did eventually offer up a thoughtful explanation.
Mistakes compounded other mistakes and the Panthers, who were dominating possession time in the opening minutes, eventually got a little too greedy on a power play.
After managing just one shot on goal on its first power play in the first period, Florida tried to keep the possession going while the Stars defenseman Miro Heiskanen was still coming out of the box, and instead Dallas blocked a shot and sent the puck down the ice for a 2-on-1 in the other direction. The Stars scored on their very first shot of the game.
Two of the other three first-period goals came off positional breakdowns, too, with one after a giveaway and one when the defense pushed too far up after a wall battle in the neutral zone.
“We turned a bunch of pucks over, but worse than that didn’t react to the turnover particularly well. We’re going in the wrong direction. It’s the end of a power play and we throw one away, but then we’re moving against the grain on it, we don’t get the second puck deep, it’s a scrum on the wall and we’re moving away from the puck,” Maurice said. “We didn’t react to our mistakes particularly well. We made a mistake and we do that and every team does it in every game, but how we reacted, the motion after the mistake.”
It was a lapse, but a period-long one and also a cautionary tale: The Panthers did this sometimes last year and usually managed to make a comeback out of it; this time, the old trick didn’t work and Florida let 20 awful minutes ruin two excellent periods.
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Aleksander Barkov dealing with illness
Star center Aleksander Barkov missed his first game of the season Thursday with an illness, but the Panthers are “optimistic” he’ll be back in the lineup Saturday when they host the Calgary Flames at 4 p.m. at FLA Live Arena, Maurice said.
The illness is not COVID-19.
“He just wasn’t feeling great,” Maurice said. “A bunch of guys have run through it and it’s a one- or a two-day thing. ... Hopefully, he feels better tomorrow and we can have him for the weekend.”
The next game is one Barkov doesn’t want to miss: This is the first trip back to South Florida for All-Star left wing Jonathan Huberdeau and star defenseman MacKenzie Weegar after the Panthers traded both the Flames (7-7-2) in July.
This story was originally published November 18, 2022 at 10:53 AM.
