Five key stats from the Florida Panthers’ Game 1 win against the Tampa Bay Lightning
The Florida Panthers made a statement on Tuesday with their 6-2 win against the Tampa Bay Lightning to begin their best-of-7 Stanley Cup playoffs opening-round series at Tampa’s Amalie Arena.
Here are five notable stats from the Panthers’ series-opening win.
16: The Panthers needed just 16 shots on goal to score six times against Tampa Bay star goaltender Andrei Vasilevskiy, who is likely going to be a Vezina Trophy finalist for the fifth time in his 11-year career. It’s the 24th time in Vasilevskiy’s career, regular season or playoffs, that he has allowed at least six goals in a game and the fewest shots that it took for him to allow as many goals. Of those 24 games, four have been against the Panthers. The Ottawa Senators have done it to him three times. No other team has accomplished the feat twice.
Two: Both star winger Matthew Tkachuk and defenseman Nate Schmidt scored two goals Tuesday. It’s the third time in franchise history the Panthers have had multiple players score multiple goals in the same playoff game. The others:
▪ April 29, 2024, Game 5 of first-round series vs Tampa Bay: Aleksander Barkov and Carter Verhaeghe each scored twice in a 6-1 win.
▪ May 18, 1996, Game 1 of the Eastern Conference final against Pittsburgh: Tom Fitzgerald and Dave Lowry each scored twice in a 5-1 win.
For Tkachuk, it’s his fourth multigoal playoff game with the Panthers, which currently stands as the most in franchise history. It broke a tie with teammate Verhaeghe, who has three such games.
Meanwhile, Schmidt is just the second defenseman in franchise history to have a multigoal game in the playoffs. The other is Brandon Montour, who had a pair of two-goal games in Round 1 against the Boston Bruins in the 2023 Stanley Cup playoffs.
14 seconds: Speaking of Schmidt and Tkachuk, their first goals were scored just 14 seconds apart in the second period, which helped the Panthers build a 4-1 lead.
It marks the fastest two goals in a playoff game in franchise history. The previous best was 25 seconds, set in Game 1 of the 1996 Conference Quarterfinals by Ray Sheppard and Mike Hough.
3: The Panthers scored three of their goals on the power play. It is just the third time in Panthers history that they scored at least three power-play goals in one playoff game. The others were May 10, 2024, against the Boston Bruins (four power-play goals) and April 17, 2012, against the New Jersey Devils (three power-play goals).
8-1: The Panthers are 8-1 all-time in playoff series when they win Game 1. That includes a perfect 5-0 over the past two seasons, during which they made it to the Stanley Cup Final each year.
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