Florida Panthers ‘playing really good hockey right now’ entering another tough road trip
For the third and final time this season, the Florida Panthers are heading west for an extended road trip.
And they’re doing so understandably feeling good about themselves after their performance over the past week and a half. Florida (22-12-2) has won each of its past four games — one game shy of its season high — and sits in second place in the Atlantic Division behind only the Boston Bruins.
“Our team’s playing really good hockey right now,” Panthers center Sam Bennett said. “We’ll have some confidence going into this road trip for sure.”
That confidence will certainly help considering the difficulty of the schedule for this eight-day trip. Three of their four games are against teams currently in playoff spots.
It starts Tuesday against the Arizona Coyotes, who hold the Western Conference’s second wild card spot. After that, they play Thursday against the Vegas Golden Knights, who second in the Pacific Division, and then Saturday against the Central-leading Colorado Avalanche. They cap the road trip on Jan. 9 against the St. Louis Blues, who are just on the outside looking in of the wild card picture in the Western Conference.
It’s the Panthers’ final extended, cross-country trip of the season. Their first trip was a three-game, four-day set against the San Jose Sharks, Los Angeles Kings and Anaheim Ducks in mid-November in which Florida went 2-1-0. Then it was a five-game, 11-day excursion that started in Columbus before continuing to Seattle and Western Canada in mid-December and saw the Panthers go just 2-3-0.
Once the trip is finished, they will have played 23 of their first 40 games of the season on the road. The Panthers will also only have two more road games (out of 18) outside of the Eastern Time Zone the rest of the season after this — Jan. 22 at Nashville and March 12 at Dallas.
Florida is 10-7-2 away from Amerant Bank Arena this season; the .579 road points percentage is 10th in the NHL.
“We feel good,” Panthers coach Paul Maurice said. “Winning helps a little bit to that end. We’ve been on the road a bit. The last one was 11 days. This one is ten. There’s a cost to that, but we’ve survived it. Even in the losses that we had, we learned something, came back and bounced back from them. We want to have a better road trip than the last one for sure. Good opponents. Really good teams that we’re going against.”
This and that
▪ Defenseman Niko Mikkola was the only Panthers player who didn’t practice Monday before the team’s flight to Arizona, but Maurice said he should be available to play against the Coyotes.
▪ Panthers goaltenders over the four-game win streak have logged a .925 save percentage, stopping 99 of 107 shots on goal. Sergei Bobrovsky was in net for three of those games — wins over Vegas, the Tampa Bay Lightning and the New York Rangers — and posted a .920 save percentage (81 saves on 88 shots), while Anthony Stolarz stopped 18 of 19 shots against the Montreal Canadiens.
▪ Bobrovsky’s 17 wins are tied with Winnipeg’s Connor Hellebuyck and Vancouver’s Thatcher Demko for the second-most in the NHL, trailing only Colorado’s Alexander Georgiev (19).
▪ The Panthers’ on Saturday gave up their first power-play goal in six games. Even with that, Florida’s penalty kill has been the best in the NHL for nearly the past two months. Since Nov. 8, the Panthers have an NHL-leading 89.2-percent success rate on the penalty kill, giving up just eight goals in 74 opposing power-play attempts over that 25-game span.
▪ The Panthers are 15-0-2 this season when scoring the first goal and 15-0-1 when leading entering the third period. Florida’s 30 goals allowed in the third period are tied for the fourth-fewest in the NHL.
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