Panthers go bust in Vegas, fall into 2-0 hole in Stanley Cup Final with blowout loss

The first game of the 2023 Stanley Cup Final on Saturday ended in fisticuffs and the Vegas Golden Knights smiling while the Florida Panthers lost their cool. The Golden Knights promised they weren’t going to be fazed by the Panthers’ hard-hitting, pot-stirring style, and Florida promised not to tone any of it down.

It took just about seven minutes for it all to go wrong for the Panthers. A crunching hit by Ivan Barbashev on Josh Mahura baited Ryan Lomberg into retaliation and a slashing penalty. An extra-man advantage turned into another power-play goal for Jonathan Marchessault and the Golden Knights. Florida was on its heels early and never recovered, getting blown out 7-2 in Game 2 of the Stanley Cup Final on Monday in Las Vegas for their most lopsided loss of the postseason.

“We weren’t able to play the game we wanted,” forward Anton Lundell said.

For the first time in the 2023 Stanley Cup playoffs, the Panthers are going back to South Florida for Game 3 of a series without stealing home-ice advantage from their higher-seeded opponent. The Panthers trail 2-0 in the Cup Final and now need to win four of the next five games to win their first Stanley Cup.

They’re also still looking for their first win in a Final. Florida’s only other trip to the championship back in 1996 ended in a sweep at the hands of the Avalanche. The gap between the Panthers and Golden Knights, at least in the Stanley Cup playoffs, isn’t as wide as it was between Florida and Colorado in the 1996 Stanley Cup Final, but the Panthers have fallen back into all their worst habits — the ones which are why they’re the lowest-seeded team in the Cup playoffs — at the worst possible time.

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They have now committed 24 penalties for 110 penalty minutes in two games, and allowed Vegas to go 4 of 11 on the power play. On the other end of the ice, Florida is 0 for 6 on the power play through two games. Superstar right wing Matthew Tkachuk, who entered the series with the second-most points in the playoffs, didn’t record his first point until garbage time Monday and committed a pair of misconduct penalties after the Panthers fell behind 4-0 in the second period — although his first one came in the aftermath of a huge, clean hit star center Jack Eichel rather than a late-game sucker punch, like he did in Game 1 for his first misconduct penalty of the series.

Game 2 started to slip away from the Panthers when they couldn’t convert on a power play in the first period Florida fired five shots at Adin Hill in its first abbreviated 1:44 power play, and the Golden Knights goaltender stuffed them all, with the T-Mobile Arena crowd of 18,561 getting wilder and wilder with each successive stop.

Hill finished with 29 saves and now has stopped 62 of 66 shots in this series.

Twenty-one seconds after the power play expired, Golden Knights defenseman Alec Martinez scored after a defensive breakdown, and Vegas went up 2-0 with 2:01 left in the first.

The Panthers finished the period with only four 5-on-5 shots and went more than 15 minutes without one before defenseman Gustav Forsling took one from the point with 38 seconds left and also lost defenseman Radko Gudas to an injury after he got hit in the head by Barbashev just before Lomberg went to the penalty box.

Less than three minutes into the third period, the Golden Knights pushed their lead to 3-0 when Vegas forward Nicolas Roy fooled defenseman Casey Fitzgerald, who was pressed into a bigger role after Gudas went out, and went untouched from the left corner to the front of the net to beat Sergei Bobrovsky. The Golden Knights made it 4-0 just 4:11 later when Vegas forward Brett Howden scored in transition to chase Bobrovsky from the game.

Alex Lyon replaced his fellow goaltender with 12:50 left in the second.

“I’ll sweat it over for the next two days,” coach Paul Maurice said when asked who might start Game 3 on Thursday. “We need to be a little better in front of our goaltender.”

In two games in Vegas, Bobrovsky gave up more goals than he did in the entire Eastern Conference finals — the star goalie made just nine saves on 13 shots in Game 2 and 38 on 46 in the two games combined — and Florida, after losing by three in Game 1, faced more three-goal deficits than it did in the entire first three rounds of the playoffs.

Tensions finally bubbled over with 2:04 left in the second period.

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Eichel tried to carry the puck out of the defensive zone and started to lose his balance. Tkachuk flew in and slammed his right shoulder into the unsuspecting forward’s chest, sending him hobbling back to the locker room and sparking an all-out brawl. Star defenseman Alex Pietrangelo and Martinez both tried to grab Tkachuk, and All-Star center Aleksander Barkov and defenseman Gustav Forsling jumped at his defense. Tkachuk, eventually pushed out of the fray, came in late and grabbed Pietrangelo from behind, and wound up sitting out 12 minutes because of a two-minute roughing penalty and 10-minute misconduct.

Tkachuk said he never got an explanation for the misconduct call and Eichel said it was “a clean check.”

“I really have no idea what came about for that,” Tkachuk said. “I just came off the bench and saw him in the middle of the ice with his head down. It doesn’t matter who you are, you shouldn’t be going through the middle with your head down. You’re going to get hit. I would get hit, too, if I had my head down in the middle. It’s not a big deal. He’s a really good player and really good players get hit, too.”

The game was already out of hand on the scoreboard with the Panthers down 4-0. Now, it was out of hand beyond just the game, with Vegas getting the best out of Florida’s fire-starting instincts.

With Tkachuk still back in the dressing room, the Panthers’ short-lived comeback prayer died almost as soon as it began. Lundell scored just 14 seconds into the third period to cut the Golden Knights’ lead to 4-1, only Marchessault, whom Florida sent to Vegas as part of the Golden Knights’ 2017 NHL Expansion Draft, answered all of 96 seconds later off an assist by Eichel.

Tkachuk eventually did come back and scored his first goal of the series with 7:16 remaining, and then got himself ejected 1:17 later with another 10-minute misconduct penalty.