If the Florida Panthers were looking for a ‘get right’ game, they don’t get much better than a chance to do it against the NHL’s best team.
The Panthers came out firing on all cylinders Saturday night when they hosted the Winnipeg Jets, handing the visitors just their third loss of the season.
Florida was coming off back-to-back losses to the New Jersey Devils, both on home ice, and neither particularly close in terms of competition.
Certainly not what we’ve come to expect from the Panthers under Head Coach Paul Maurice.
Now in his third season with the team, Maurice knows how to handle his squad, when to push buttons and which ones to push.
Let’s get to Saturday’s takeaways:
BACK TO PANTHERS HOCKEY
As often is the case with Maurice’s Panthers, the team finds a way to snap back into form and get back to doing the things that make them successful.
Fast, physical hockey, clean zone exits, high quality opportunities, five-man defending…these are things that help the Panthers be the Panthers.
When it came to going toe-to-toe with the streaking Jets, it was Florida that took round one by playing their style to perfection.
It’ll be interesting to see if Winnipeg can make things more difficult on the Panthers when they face off on Tuesday from the Jets’ barn.
“Well, we needed it,” Maurice said of the win. “When you lose two at home, that hurts. It’s worse when it’s the same team that beats you twice, so we needed a kind of foundation game, get back to the basics of what we’re good at, and we were good in almost all parts of it. I thought our bench was right, and you’re looking for almost the heads more than the bodies. You understand over the course the year, the bodies aren’t going to be great a lot of nights. But I thought that we came out of our fog a little bit here, and we were good tonight.”
DAY OFF PAID OFF
After the losses to the Devils, Florida took the day off on Friday and gave the players a chance to reset and recharge their batteries however they saw fit.
It sure showed on the ice.
“We needed to be away from the rink,” said Maurice. “We’ve just been – and it’s schedule based and flights and all this – we’ve been at the rink an awful lot, and sometimes you need not to see the coach.”
A BOB BLANKING
Sergei Bobrovsky sure showed up for the big Saturday night game in Sunrise.
Bob finished with 27 saves while earning his first shutout of the season.
He was tested early, making two of his three high danger saves during the first twenty minutes, and Florida defended well in front of him.
“He was very good and solid,” Maurice said of Bobrovsky. “And I felt that from the bench, because they had a lot of very good hands in close areas around the net, and those scrums early in the game.”
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