Florida Panthers show why they’re fun & No. 1, tie NHL playoffs with 5-1 rout of Capitals | Opinion
At the moment someone had to Thursday night, the leaders led. At the moment the No. 1-seeded Panthers were in peril of losing a grip on the first round of the NHL playoffs, the team’s three best and longest-tenured players did not much less than rescue a season.
Aleksander Barkov. Jonathan Huberdeau. Aaron Ekblad.
The three stars had been quiet and off the scoresheet in the Cats’ Game 1 loss two nights earlier, but Thursday they combined to bust open a scoreless game and produce two goals 98 seconds apart, opening the floodgates on a 5-1 Florida victory that evened the series with Washington 1-1.
The Panthers’ playoff theme and hashtag is “Time To Hunt.” Lose Thursday and it would have been “Time To Panic” for Florida fans. Instead it is “Time To Relax,” or at least get down off the ledge as the series moves up to D.C. for Games 3 and 4 starting Saturday.
At 0-0 Thursday the Capitals were enjoying the same dominant puck possession they had in Game 1, and outshooting Florida by double.
“We came out real nervous again,” said coach Andrew Brunette.
The Cats badly needed something good to happen.
Done.
Barkov glided a gorgeous pass that left Ekblad alone for an uncontested slapshot that sliced through traffic and made the horn blast 16:20 into the first period — on only the team’s fourth shot on goal.
The crowd was still buzzing when, at 17:58, Huberdeau’s shot on goal turned assist as Barkov poked it in from the edge of the crease to make it 2-0. Huberdeau, whose 115 season points set a club record, still is due a big game in the Stanley Cup hunt, but this was a start.
“We score [the first two goals] and now it’s our time to hunt,” said Anton Lundell.
Cats and Caps would trade goals in the second period.
Washington made it 2-1 on Niklas Backstrom’s power-play goal, with Florida left short by Lundell’s hooking penalty.
The Panthers reanimated the sellout crowd 27 seconds later for a 3-1 cushion when Mason Marchment’s shot beat the goalie 1-on-1.
Florida then had a huge four-minute penalty kill to protect that lead after the goal-scorer Marchment was sent off for a double-penalty, but the defense rose to the challenge.
It was 4-1 late in the second on a close-range put-in by Lundell, the 20-year-old Finnish player who was Florida’s top draft pick in 2020.
The clean-shaven Lundell was asked this week why he wasn’t growing a playoff beard, a tradition in hockey.
“I don’t shave,” he said. “We might have to wait a couple years.”
The game turned rout at 5-1 two minutes later when Carter Verhaeghe found the high-right corner of the net.
“We want 10!” chanted the giddy home crowd.
All the while Bobrovsky was a fortress before the Florida net.
“Bob was really solid, gave us a chance to find our game,” said Brunette.
I have always cringed at sports fans saying “must win” in situations that are not literally that. On Thursday night, though, by everything but the math, Game 2 was that for Florida.
Especially the way Game 1 had been lost Tuesday, the Panthers blowing a 2-1 home lead in the third period and losing 4-2. After going 39-0 during the season when leading into the third. The sporting damnation “choking” has been applied with less cause.
Imagine the onerous weight if the Panthers had lost Thursday and carried a 2-0 series deficit up to Washington? Historical NHL data says the probability of the Cats still winning the series would have been only 13.4 percent.
Imagine the gloomy here-we-go-again narrative if Florida were down two and seemed headed to yet another early playoff exit for a club that has had nothing but those (in six tries) since shockingly reaching the Stanley Cup Final in 1996?
No. 8 seeds beating No. 1s are not the rarity on ice that they are in the NBA; in hockey it’s happened four times just since 2107.
But this No. 1 had the best record in the NHL and is the best team (by a lot) in franchise history. With the most goals scored by any team since 1995-96. And with the best home record also in 26 years.
A Game 2 loss would have meant these Panthers stared head-on at being the biggest postseason disappointment in South Florida sports history. It would have been as if the perfection-destined 1972 Dolphins, after a 14-0 regular season, had lost their playoff opener.
All of that gloom was in play until the Panthers’ version of the Big 3 — Barkov, Huberdeau and Ekblad — changed the game Thursday in a 98-second flurry. The players voted three stars of the game were Barkov, Ekblad and Bobrovsky.
A subtext of this series is as something of a coaching referendum on the Panthers’ Brunette, a first-time head coach abruptly promoted when Joel Quenneville was forced to resign early in the season for his part in a scandal in Chicago 10 years earlier.
Brunette has worked under the “interim” title he still carries and surely an advance past the first round — at minimum — will be required if he is to be retained.
The playoff-unaccustomed Cats seemed to mirror Brunette’s own inexperience in Game 1 as the Caps seemed better prepared for the magnitude of the moment. And seemed to work harder.
“They had a little more will than we did on the 50-50 puck,” Brunette admitted Thursday before the game. “We were disconnected offensively. And in the third period we made uncharacteristic [defensive] mistakes. It was a good lesson that this is not gonna be easy. Not that we didn’t know it before — but [Game 1] painted it in color.”
Said Claude Giroux, a Game 1 scorer acquired this season largely for his playoff experience: “We didn’t help each other out there.”
“They out-competed us,” Verhaeghe said.
None of that was repeated Thursday night.
That was when — one game late but just in time — the team with the best record in the NHL showed up.
This story was originally published May 5, 2022 at 10:18 PM.
