‘Almost Twilight Zone’: Inside the Panthers’ bonkers, historic first period vs. Canadiens
Sometime around the second half of the first period Thursday, Aleksander Barkov looked around, absorbed everything happening and asked, “Are we going to get 10 in the first period?”
Ryan Lomberg, seated directly to his left on the Florida Panthers’ bench, playfully jammed an elbow into his captain’s chest while the captain smiled. They couldn’t believe what was happening. No one could have possibly fathomed it. The Panthers, who went on to win 9-5, went up 7-3 on the Montreal Canadiens in just 13:18 in the sort of performance the NHL had literally never seen before.
“Almost ‘Twilight Zone,’” coach Paul Maurice said Thursday. “You don’t see that, just every puck goes in.”
It was the a period defying any sort of reasonable explanation or possible comparison.
Florida’s seven goals were a franchise record for a single period.
The 10 total goals tied an NHL record for most goals in a first period and were the most in any period since the high-scoring 1980s, and the Panthers and Canadiens combined to reach 10 goals faster than anyone else in league history.
Florida (34-27-7) was down 1-0 in 16 seconds, up 2-1 just 3:01 later and eventually led 6-3 even though star goaltender Sergei Bobrovsky had given up goals on each of the first three shots he faced.
“If you came 30 minutes late, you probably were regretting it,” All-Star right wing Matthew Tkachuk said Thursday. “Hopefully, you didn’t get stuck in traffic.”
As far as cogent analysis, there wasn’t much to offer up.
The Panthers scored seven goals on 19 shots, 13 scoring chances and eight high-danger chances in the first Montreal scored three on six shots, four scoring chances and only one high-danger chance. At the end of the period, expected goals were at just 1.55-0.31 in favor of Florida.
“The All-Star Game had more defense,” Tkachuk quipped.
Said Maurice: “There were more goals than chances to score, so you just don’t see it.”
The Canadiens’ second goal was a prayer of a turnaround shot from the point and their third got deflected off the butt of Montreal left wing Michael Pezzetta’s stick. Star defenseman Aaron Ekblad scored the goal to put the Panthers ahead for good by shooting off a defender’s foot and forward Carter Verhaeghe notched the record-setting goal by bouncing the puck off the back of the goaltenders legs.
Montreal benched goaltender Sam Montembault in the first period, then brought him back in when his replacement fared just as poorly. Forward Sam Reinhart scored a goal when he beat a whistle by a fraction of a second as the officials were trying to stop play for a scrum. There was nothing normal about the first period at FLA Live Arena.
“Weird, crazy, ‘Stranger Things,’” Ekblad said Thursday, invoking a more contemporary television reference than his coach. “It was a weird game.”
Said Maurice: “I’ve got nothing to say, is what I’m telling you. Anything that comes out of my mouth is just me making stuff up because I’m still not sure what I saw.”
If there were any real takeaways, these are two key ones:
▪ First, the win was really important for Florida, which moved within three points of a postseason spot and still has two games in hand on the eighth-place Islanders, and can close the gap to one point Saturday when it finishes out a seven-game homestand against the New Jersey Devils (44-17-7) at 6 p.m. in Sunrise.
▪ Second, the Panthers are proving they can win in virtually any style, with now two come-from-behind wins in their last three games, and victories in the last two weeks when scoring as few as two goals and now as many as nine.
“The one positive we can take from it is we’ve played games, especially recently, where we’ve won 2-1 games, we’ve won high-scoring games, we’ve won coming back,” Tkachuk said.
For the most part, Florida was pretty much rendered speechless or awestruck by the unprecedented scoring outburst.
Again: No game had ever started quite like this one, with such a rapid-fire explosion of goals, and “it completely affected the rest of the game,” Maurice said.
The first-year coach is known as one of his sport’s better orators and even he quickly ran out of ways to break down what he saw, other than by pointing out he — nor anyone else on the Panthers — had ever been part of anything quite like it and probably never will again.
Said Maurice: “I’m not sure there’s anything necessarily usable of the video to the game of hockey.”
