Yahoo Sports Three takeaways: Panthers pick up tough 2 points, Bobrovsky stole game during OT
The train kept rolling for the Florida Panthers on Saturday night.
Florida defeated the visiting Philadelphia Flyers 4-3 in a shootout, earning their seventh straight victory and improving to 11-3-1 on the young NHL season.
It wasn’t the easiest game for Florida, but as we’ve seen many times over the past couple years, this team finds ways to win in all kinds of different circumstances.
Perhaps still reeling from a long road trip and facing a team desperate to reverse their fortunes, Florida took a couple shots on the chin but ultimately kept their feet and TKO’ed the Flyers in a skills competition.
Let’s get into the takeaways:
A TOUGH TWO POINTS
Philadelphia may not have come into the game with the best record, but they played a heavy game and pushed the Panthers to the limit.
They had just picked up a shootout win over Tampa Bay and you could tell by the emotion they played with that the Flyers are fighting hard to get their season turned around.
Philly put the Panthers on their heels early and nearly picked up both points on the night, if not for the late-game heroics of goaltender Sergei Bobrovsky.
“This was one on the calendar I was most worried about," said Panthers Head Coach Paul Maurice. "It's not always your first game back (from a road trip), it's the next one, and Philadelphia played their butts off tonight. I had no problem with that game being tight after two (periods) with how hard they worked, and that's the way it should be. You worked as hard as they worked, and it was a grinder, up and down. I don't think things were very easy, I don't think our hands were great, but we handled that game, the way it was played, very, very well. We weren't great, but a big chunk of that is the other team played really hard and battled and competed on every puck.”
BIG GAME BOB
Ah yes, Mr. Bobrovsky.
It’s amazing how much more you can appreciate his game when playing on a team that defends like Florida does.
Bob isn’t necessarily the busiest goalie, but he’s going to face some high end pressure.
It’s in the game’s biggest moments that Bobrovsky seems to shine his brightest, and with Florida so often leading in games these days, it’s rare when he’s called upon to be the Cats’ savior.
Well, tonight was one of those nights.
When the dust settled, Bobrovsky finished with 34 saves, including 12 on Philly’s 13 high danger shots.
Four of those high danger shots came during the five-minute, three-on-three overtime.
They were all breakaways.
“Huge saves,” Maurice said. “I think in our first, whatever it was without those two centermen (Sasha Barkov and Tomas Nosek) and Matthew (Tkachuk), we gave up a little more than we liked, but we haven't forced him to be the difference. I think he was the difference tonight, clearly. We haven't asked him or forced him to do that too often, but he rises to that. I don't look at Sergei’s stats at all, or Knighter (Spencer Knight) for that matter. I watch the game. (Panthers goalie coach) Robbie Tallas knows how well they play. There’s a lot of little stuff that happened around the net that he had to be really good on tonight.”
MIKKOLA STREAKING
During his first couple seasons with the Panthers, Niko Mikkola has been an extremely solid and steady defenseman.
You don’t notice him that much, which is a good thing, but every so often, he does something in the offensive zone that makes you go, ‘Oh!’
Lately, Mikkola has been finding his way onto the scoresheet more than usual.
After going pointless in seven of Florida’s first eight games this season, he’s now picked up assists in each of their past four.
While the offensive contributions are surely welcomed and appreciated, it’s not where Mikkola’s true value to the Panthers lies.
But hey, as long as he’s still doing what he’s asked on the back end, chipping in with a few apples won’t hurt anyone.
“We’re not talking about Mikks’ offense,” Maurice said with a smirk. “He's a hard-working gamer, right? He's involved. If he's supposed to get up the ice, he gets up the ice. If he's supposed to go to the net, he'll go to the net. He'll make plays all on competition. He's a very, very competitive man, kind of an identity player for us back there on the blueline. So I'm glad he's getting some points, because it's fun. We didn't sign them to put us over the top offensively, but those guys, you love when they get rewarded because they grind so hard in all the other parts of the game.”
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