Panthers blanked by Lightning in penalty-filled, chippy encounter between state rivals

Be grateful that 150 miles of swampland separates the Florida Panthers and Tampa Bay Lightning. If not, the Florida National Guard might have had a working Christmas.

These longtime rivals combined for one the ugliest evenings in their three-decade rivalry Monday, a game won by the Lightning 4-0 on our side of the Everglades. The second leg of any back-to-back is always chippy, but this was particularly malevolent.

Monday’s game featured 63 penalty minutes and countless cheap shots, including a diabolical knee-to-knee hit on Matthew Tkachuk by Nikita Kucherov that sent the Panthers winger to the training room for evaluation and the Lightning forward to the dressing room with a game misconduct.

Tkachuk called for help immediately and couldn’t get off the ice without it. At best, his night looked done. A serious injury seemed likely.

Instead, he returned less than an hour of real-time later to a standing ovation.

“That’s who he is,” Panthers captain Aleksander Barkov said. “He’s incredible and he’s not going down easily and you can count on him that he’s gonna come back, no matter what. So he’s a true, true warrior. He battles through a lot of things and today was the same thing.”

Tkachuk clearly wasn’t at 100 percent when he returned. But he appeared determined to even the score, and was fit enough to try. Tkachuk delivered multiple hits with dubious intentions upon his return, including a high forearm to the face of Luke Glendening that drew a well-earned roughing penalty late in the second.

Adding insult to injury? The Panthers (21-12-2) were blanked by the historically generous Jonas Johansson, who entered Monday’s game with a 3.84 goals against average. Johansson turned away all 36 shots he faced for just his third shutout in the last four years.

The Panthers at this point are pretty familiar to the feeling. Monday was the third time in seven games they’ve been shut out.

“I think we didn’t have a whole lot in the tank, but they didn’t lay over in that game and there’s some pretty good spark there, so I’ll leave it where it is,” Panthers coach Paul Maurice said. “The four days [off] are gonna be great for this team.”

During and afterwards, the game’s result felt secondary to the extracurriculars. Monday night was a blood sport -- and more blood than sport.

Kucherov’s dirty hit on Tkachuk was the most egregious exchange. But it didn’t happen in a vacuum.

It was the ugly climax of a brewing storm of antipathy. The teams combined for five roughing penalties in the first period, with 27 combined penalty minutes assessed. From the opening faceoff to the final whistle, every stoppage in play was seemingly either caused by or included some sort of hand-to-hand combat.

The Lightning (19-11-2) were determined to take the fight to the Panthers after Sunday’s 4-2 Florida victory in Tampa.

And the Panthers took the bait -- to their detriment.

It was the shovel that dug their 3-0 hole at the break, with the opening goal a direct result of Panthers center Sam Bennett’s on-ice wrestling match with Erik Cernak in Florida’s offensive zone.

That wasted energy gave Kucherov space to lift a backhand past Sergei Bobrovsky some seven minutes into regulation.

Jake Guentzel made it 2-0 with a blistering wrist shot less the three minutes later.

And then Tampa added a third on the man advantage after fancy stickhandling by Brayden Point induced a slashing penalty by Eetu Luostarinen. Forty-two seconds into the power play, Mitchell Chaffee scored on a putback.

From then on, the question wasn’t so much who would win, but who would escape with all body parts attached.

Period 3 was a certainly more subdued than the two that preceded it. But it also wasn’t totally clean. Bennett had to check his teeth after taking a high stick from Nick Perbix. But even that bit of luck was wasted, as Brandon Hagel scored a 160-foot goal into an empty net to end any lingering drama.