Bobrovsky’s big saves, Lundell’s nasty shootout goal and a ‘playoff-mode’ win for Florida
Anton Lundell was down to his third stick by the time he set up to take the Florida Panthers’ first shootout attempt in their thrilling 2-1 win against the Minnesota Wild on Monday. He broke two during regulation at the Xcel Energy Center — it was just the kind of game this was — and, with his third, he sized up his options as he drifted toward the Wild’s goal in the shootout.
The forward faked left and then right, and then did the same thing about half a dozen more times, tapping his stick on either side of the puck until Filip Gustavsson made his move. Lundell drew him to the left, swung his stick and the puck back all the way to his right, and tossed a shootout-tying goal into the net. After another shootout goal by Aleksander Barkov and two more saves by Sergei Bobrovsky, the Panthers finished off one of their biggest wins of the season to kick off a four-game road trip in St. Paul, Minnesota.
“It took 65 minutes and a shootout,” Lundell said Monday, “but a really big win for us.”
The shootout win, which pulled Florida within a point of postseason position ahead of a Tuesday showdown with the St. Louis Blues at the Enterprise Center in Missouri, was certainly not the prettiest.
All the scoring happened in the span of just 3:09 in the first few minutes of the second period. Only 13 high-danger chances occurred during 5-on-5 play, despite 53 total shots. The Panthers didn’t manage a single shot on goal in overtime and the two teams combined to go 0 of 12 on power plays.
Those details, however, are all the sort of things Paul Maurice gets excited about.
“Filthy,” the coach said, smiling about the final score. “That’s what playoff hockey’s all about.”
Its his belief — and, by proxy of hiring Maurice, the organization’s, too — Florida can only win its first Stanley Cup by winning games with few enough goals to count on one hand. A year ago, the Panthers were the NHL’s highest scoring team in a quarter of a century, won the Presidents’ Trophy, struggled with the No. 8-seed Washington Capitals in the first round of the 2022 Stanley Cup playoffs, then got swept out of the postseason by the Tampa Bay Lightning. General manager Bill Zito hired Maurice, who has also never won a Cup, to bring an old-school style to South Florida and, for better and worse, he has.
The Panthers are fighting for a spot in the 2023 Stanley Cup playoffs and the Wild is fighting to hang on to its own, and the level of intensity Monday at least fit the playoff-style billing Maurice and his team used to describe the matchup.
There were 14 total penalties, and nearly a full-fledged fight between star defenseman Aaron Ekblad and All-Star winger Kirill Kaprizov in the final four minutes. There were hardly any breakaways and Florida scored its only goal when forward Eetu Luostarinen tipped in a blue-line shot by defenseman Gustav Forsling. The Panthers led for all of 3:09 before Minnesota answered — the game was tied for 61:51 of 65 minutes.
Florida even went 0 of 7 on the power play. The Panthers, whose postseason run ended last year largely because they went 1 of 13 on the power play in Round 2, really were playing like it was the Stanley Cup playoffs.
“There wasn’t a lot of flow,” Maurice conceded.
The abysmal power-play performance probably should have cost Florida the game. If the game was allowed to go on interminably like it does in the Cup playoffs, the Panthers might have been in real trouble, as they managed just one shot in the final 20 minutes and none in the final 13. Those are real issues — especially the power play, which is in a 1-for-21 slump — Florida should not overlook in the name of hyping up a playoff-style win.
At the same time, Florida did hold the Wild to eight 5-on-5 high-danger chances, deny all five of Minnesota’s power plays and limit the Wild to just 28 total shots, including only 25 in regulation. Although Bobrovsky made a handful of clutch saves down the stretch and on the penalty kill, the Panthers mostly did make life easy for their star goaltender, and sometimes a great goalie and defense can be enough to win in the playoffs — All-Star goaltender Andrei Vasilevskiy is the other biggest reason Florida lost to the rival Lightning last year.
The Panthers will need to be better than they were Monday if they want to win a championship. They’ll have to be better just to make the playoffs, although they are now favored to get in, according to The Athletic’s projections.
The most positive sign to take away from Monday, Maurice said, is how poised Florida stayed in a tight game. When their offense was floundering, the Panthers didn’t push too hard to score and give up great chances in the process. When star defenseman Brandon Montour’s would-be game-winning goal was disallowed for a ticky-tack incidental-contact call on a second-period 5-on-3 chance, Florida didn’t pout and let Minnesota seize control.
Bobrovsky stood tall and so did the Panthers’ defense. Whether it’s good enough for the playoffs or good enough to get there is open for debate. What matters now is it was was good enough for one night.
“The only thing I can say it’s big points for us,” Bobrovsky said Monday. “This time of year, it’s already like playoff mode.”
