They tried to rattle Lyon. The career minor-leaguer responded by making Panthers history
Alex Lyon skated from the mayhem while a mass of bodies piled up where his net was supposed to be. The Florida Panthers were through with the Ottawa Senators, ticked off by a few too many bumps and jabs at their goaltender, and their entire line pounced in the second period Thursday.
Radko Gudas threw punches at Patrick Brown. Ryan Lomberg tackled Mark Kastelic into the goal and brought down the net. All the while, Lyon watched and waited, ready to get back into his net and try to help the Panthers keep control of their postseason destiny.
“It started to get to be pretty contentious,” coach Paul Maurice said Thursday and it kept going throughout the entirety of Florida’s three-hour, 7-2 rout of the Senators at FLA Live Arena in Sunrise.
In all, there were 166 penalty minutes, eight fighting penalties, 10 misconduct calls and multiple ejections. There were seven goals through two periods for the Panthers — on only 19 shots — and they forced Ottawa to change its goaltender after less than 30 minutes. The Senators were fighting for their postseason lives — Florida (41-31-7) eliminated them from contention with its win — and, as a result, there was a lot of fighting.
Somehow, Lyon was never fazed by it. The 30-year-old American, who had never appeared in more than 11 games in an NHL season before he played in his 12th of the year Thursday, stopped 56 of the 58 shots he face, setting a franchise record for saves in a regulation game.
There was a lot to say about this game, but it was hard to get past the goalie.
“He played unreal,” All-Star right wing Matthew Tkachuk said Thursday.
The sheer volume of saves would have been impressive on its own. The way he went about it made it something even more.
First, there’s the unlikelihood of this entire situation. Before this year, Lyon, who was undrafted out of Yale, had only played in 24 games across five NHL seasons. Until February, he was stuck in the American Hockey League again, the Panthers’ third option behind goaltenders Sergei Bobrovsky and Spencer Knight. He got a chance to return to the NHL a little more than a month ago when Knight went into the NHL’s player assistant program and a chance to start a little more than a week ago when Bobrovsky got sick, and he has been unflappable since. He has started five straight games and won all five, and will try to make it six in a row when he and Florida face the Capitals (34-35-9) on Saturday at 7 p.m. at Washington’s Capital One Arena.
His save percentage in these last five games is now up to .961, and his goals against average at 1.40, and he stopped 96.6 percent of the shots he saw Thursday despite Ottawa doing all it could to try to rattle him. First, All-Star left wing Brady Tkachuk went out of his way to bump him after inadvertently sliding into him. A few minutes later, Brown stopped short in front of Lyon to shoot snow at him, setting off the first major melee. Even later in the second period, Tkachuk crashed into Lyon again, setting off another fracas.
“He took a lot of hits today,” All-Star center Aleksander Barkov said Thursday, “probably more than anyone else on this team today, but he handled it really well.”
Through it all, Lyon only gave up two goals — once after the Panthers were already up 3-0 in the second and another in garbage time — and Florida actually flipped the Senators’ shenanigans against them by scoring on both the power plays after the second-period net-front flaps.
“I take pride in the fact that they feel like they need to do that,” Lyon said Thursday.
Maybe his time spent the American Hockey League prepared him.
“There’s not as many cameras in the American League, I’ll just say that much,” Lyon said. “Some things like that happen on a nightly basis. It’s just part of the game and part of the mental warfare out there that goes along with the physical play.”
The way Lyon handled it was encouraging for the Panthers and so was they way they stepped to his defense.
While it’s not unusual for perceived cheap shots at a goalie to set off brawls, Florida has clearly rallied around Lyon in the past two weeks. The five-game winning streak is its longest of the season, and the Panthers have celebrated every one of those victories like an event, blaring “The Lion King” soundtrack in the locker room — they finally switched from “I Just Can’t Wait to Be King” to “Circle of Life” on Thursday — and dubbing him “Lyon King.”
It would be hard not to get excited about this. When Lyon came back up from AHL Charlotte in February, Florida was ideally hoping it would only have to use him twice, for the second end of a pair of back-to-back sets it had in the final month of the season.
None of this is playing out the way anyone expected, with a potentially crushing four-game losing streak turning into a season-saving five-game winning streak at precisely the moment Lyon entered the starting lineup. The Panthers are going to bottle this up for as long as they can, though, and if they can win their last three games, it’ll guarantee they make the 2023 Stanley Cup playoffs.
“You feed off personalities and positive energy,” Maurice said, “and he’s brought a lot to our room.”
