Five key stats from the Florida Panthers’ Game 3 loss to the Tampa Bay Lightning
The Florida Panthers suffered a setback in their first-round Stanley Cup playoffs series with a 5-1 blowout loss to the Tampa Bay Lightning on Saturday at Amerant Bank Arena.
Florida still leads the best-of-7 series 2-1 heading into Game 4 on Monday (7 p.m., ESPN, ESPN+, Scripps Sports, Panthers+).
Here are five notable stats from the Panthers’ loss.
34: The Panthers put up a series-high 34 shots on goal against Andrei Vasilevskiy but only got one in the back of the net when Matthew Tkachuk scored 2:43 into regulation.
Vasilevskiy was other-worldly otherwise. According to the advanced hockey statistics website Natural Stat Trick, Vasilevskiy faced 15 high-danger shots on goal and stopped 14 of them. His expected goals against was 4.13 and yet he only let the one goal slip by him.
Saturday was the 10th time the Panthers have gotten no more than one goal in a playoff game despite firing off at least 34 shots on goal. Half of those games have come against Tampa Bay.
50: Tkachuk’s first-period goal marked his 50th career playoff point since joining the Panthers. In that stretch, from 2023 to now, Tkachuk’s 50 points ranks fourth behind only the Edmonton Oilers trio of Connor McDavid (69), Leon Draisaitl (54) and Evan Bouchard (54). His 20 goals are tied with Zach Hyman for second behind only Draisaitl (25). His 30 assists are third behind McDaivd (51) and Bouchard (42).
5 minutes: The Panthers have opened scoring in all three games of the series so far — and each game-opening goal has occurred within the first five minutes of regulation.
Sam Bennett opened Game 1 with his deflection goal 3:44 into the game. Nate Schmidt scored the first goal and eventual game-winner in Game 2 4:15 into the contest. And then Tkachuk got the scoring started in Game 3 2:43 into regulation.
Minus-4: The Panthers’ top defense pair of Gustav Forsling and Aaron Ekblad were a rare minus-4 on Saturday, meaning the Panthers were outscored by four goals when the duo was on the ice. They were out there for every Tampa Bay goal outside of the empty netter.
For context, Forsling, who was a career plus-26 in the playoffs prior to Saturday’s game, had never been worse than a minus-3 in his first 63 career playoff games and only had a negative plus-minus in 14 games overall.
Ekblad, playing in his first game since March 8 after serving a 20-game suspension, had been a plus-11 for his playoff career entering Saturday. He had one career minus-4 game in the playoffs before: Game 4 of the Stanley Cup Final against Edmonton on June 15, when Florida lost 8-1.
69 percent: Teams that lead a best-of-7 playoff series 2-1 after three games have advanced to the next round nearly 69 percent of the team in NHL history. The total record is 386-175, or 68.8 percent.
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