The hometown fans left their arena happy on Saturday night following the battle between the Florida Panthers and Montreal Canadiens.
Unfortunately for the Panthers, and their fans, the Cats were not the home team.
Montreal came out swinging, jumping out to an early multi-goal lead that proved to be enough to take down their division rivals and keep pace in a tight Eastern Conference playoff race.
As for the Cats, they have now dropped two of three to open their extended road trip and will need to figure things out quickly before things start to get out of hand.
After Sunday’s game on Long Island against a desperate Islanders team, Florida will battle Columbus and Washington to finish their roadie.
So yeah, there is nowhere for the Cats to hide.
Let’s get to Saturday’s takeaways:
NOT PANTHERS HOCKEY
It was pretty clear after the game that the Panthers did not think much of their collective result in Montreal.
The effort is never lacking with this squad, but on this night, the Canadiens found a way to get Florida off their game.
Perhaps falling behind early played a part, though the Panthers generally don’t come out of their style when needing to come from behind.
For whatever reason, the Cats didn’t look very much like the Cats on Saturday night.
“Well, I don’t want to tell you how I thought we played because I want to be respectful Montreal’s effort, they played hard and fast,” said Panthers Head Coach Paul Maurice. “I can’t really give you an assessment of how good that was, because I’m not sure that relates to how we played, but I think we own that one. Our play, that was on us. We would have to play considerably better before I could assess what the other team did to us.”
STRUGGLES AGAINST MONTREAL
Florida is now 0-2-0 against the Canadiens this season.
The Cats have been outscored 7-1 against Montreal and frankly they did not look good in either loss.
While the Panthers were a much different team in many ways back in late December, it is still worth wondering if Montreal has some kind of edge over the Panthers.
It isn’t out of the realm of possibility for the Cats and Habs to meet in the first round (though Ottawa’s hot streak may have something to say about that).
For his part, Maurice made clear that he felt Saturday’s loss had more to do with what Florida didn’t do well than anything Montreal did to them, and he did it without showing any disrespect to what their opponents did.
“Listen, they beat us,” Maurice said. “They’re in the fight for their lives, and they play the butts off tonight, and that should be the story here.”
DEEP BREATHS
It’s been a funky week with a couple of frustrating, unorthodox losses for the Panthers.
Now it’s probably no coincidence that both have come after Florida added Aaron Ekblad to the list of key players who are currently unavailable, as few on the team play as key a role as Ekblad does.
In similar situations, the Panthers have found ways to persevere.
Their depth and style of play allow the team-first mentality to shine through, but if that’s going to happen again this time, they have a bit of a gauntlet to get through on this road trip.
“We’ve gone from December 28th to today, and I’ve been pretty happy with our game most nights,” Maurice said. “There’s a couple we didn’t love, but…we’ll leave this one here.”
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