Florida Panthers need miracle after blowout loss, 2-0 Stanley Cup hole. But do they have one left? | Opinion

The Florida Panthers have been laid this low and written off like this before. It wasn’t ancient history. It was six weeks ago.

They just lost to go down 3-1 in the NHL playoffs’ first round to Boston, which had just fashioned the best regular season in hockey history.

The Cats were done. No chance.

They won three in a row.

They’re still here.

The question now: Can they play the miracle card again?

Florida’s 7-2 spanking of a loss Monday night in Las Vegas left the Panthers down 2-0 as the Stanley Cup Final pauses before returning to South Florida for two games starting Thursday night.

History says the situation is dire. (Just as history did on April 23 with that 3-1 hole vs Boston.)

Now, we know teams down 2-0 in the NHL’s history of seven-game series have a 55-347 record of survival, or 13.7 percent. It’s a 3-31 run when down 2-0 in the Final. That’s 8.8 percent.

That’s ugly and so was this, more brutal than the 5-2 loss in Game 1.

It was 1-0 in the first on Jonathan Marchessault’s power-play goal after Ryan Lomberg had been sent off. Alec Martinez made it 2-0 in the first. Two more came in the second, by Nicolas Roy and Brett Howden.

At 4-0 Cats goaltender Sergei Bobrovsky was given a mercy benching by coach Paul Maurice, and Alex Lyon came in.

This was not on Bob. This was not goaltending.

Florida’s undisciplined penalties though two games have been a hurtful embarrassment. The Cats had 84 penalty minutes Monday, 22 by Matthew Tkachuk. Penalties are often the resort of a team that knows it is inferior and is frustrated. Is that the case here?

“Bob has been our best player, “ said defenseman Anton Lundell. “We need to help him more. We need to defend better. We need to stay out of the [penalty] box.”

Bobrovsky needs to be back at the net in Game 3.

“I’ll sweat about that [decision] for the next two days,” coach Paul Maurice said. “We can be a little better in front of our goaltender. He’s been unbelievable for us.”

Defense against Vegas’ offensive rush was the big issue.

“The parts of our game we know we can improve we have to get to real fast,” Maurice said.

Lundell scored 14 seconds into the third period to make it 4-1 and put heart paddles on the flat-lining game. (Was TNT analyst Wayne Gretzky still awake by then?) But Vegas quickly countered for 5-1; Marchessault again. It was 6-1 on ... oh, does it really matter?

Tkachuk scored his 10th goal of the postseason for Florida to make it 6-2.

The game could not end soon enough. The Panthers’ jet back home might as well have been idling outside the arena in the second period.

Panthers star Aleksander Barkov had said, “Execution in the first game maybe wasn’t there.”

Nor was it in the second game.

Florida was missing Radko Gudas to a first-period injury, and Eetu Luostarinen also was out. No excuses, though. A 12-4 goals differential through two games does not fib. Is Vegas this good? Or has Florida picked a bad time to big this ... not good?

“There is not enough room for us to panic,” Gudas had said before the game.

There might be now.

“We like things the hard way,” Lomberg said. “Look back to being down 3-1 to Boston or the four-overtime game in Carolina. Instead of thinking how hard it is, we’re thinking how cool it is.”

Is it still cool at 2-0? Or is getting hot enough to melt ice?

Now we see what home means. The power of it.

“Going home to our amazing fans,” said Tkachuk, “we’re going to need them.”

Sunrise, where the Panthers play, is the smallest host city of any major professional team in North America. It isn’t even a suburb of Miami. It is a suburb of a suburb of Miami.

The joke is that the Panthers are the second-biggest thing in Sunrise, after the neighboring Sawgrass Mills Mall.

It wasn’t all that long ago that Sunrise was called the Sunrise Golf Village and the main attraction in town was the Upside-Down House. (Google it.)

The city has grown. And now it is up to Sunrise, to Panthers fans, to lift up the Cats starting Thursday night and get them back in this hunt for Florida’s first Stanley Cup trophy in franchise history.

This whole season has been a bit of a miracle, right? A No. 8 seed in the Stanley Cup Final at all? Crazy. Only one other team has ever done what the Cats are trying to do. Now the home crowd must lift the Panthers in the club’s first Stanley Cup Final home games since 1996.

This has proved to be a team of fighters.

Now we see how much of that the Panthers have left.