SUNRISE, Fla – Roberto Luongo was nearly unbeatable Thursday night, nearly.
Luongo made 38 saves, some of them stellar in the Panthers 3-1 loss to the Anaheim Ducks.
“I think we were a little bit frustrated,” Ducks coach Bruce Boudreau said. “You get a goaltending performance like that, that’s freaking pretty good. But you have to stick with it because if you throw your hands up in the air and say we’re not going to score, then all of a sudden you end up losing the game.”
Frederik Andersen had a bounce back game in making 23 saves for the Ducks to get the win. His last effort earned him the hook in a loss to the Nashville Predators.
“He’s our No. 1 guy and we’ve got to make sure that he plays,” Boudreau said. “And I have to show him that I have the utmost confidence in him. If he’s a forward or a defenseman, we all have bad games. They don’t sit out the next game. We wanted Freddy right back in there and he rewarded us.”
Aleksander Barkov picked up the lone goal for the Panthers.
“They were a big, strong, physical team and we didn’t respond to that very well,” Panthers coach Gerard Gallant said. “Our guys didn’t want the puck enough. You can’t win a game like that with [our] goalie standing on his head. He kept us in the game as long as he could.”
With the win, the Ducks improved to 7-9-4 and are 6-2-2 in their last ten games.
Cam Fowler and Andrew Cogliano were the only Ducks to get a puck past Luongo.
“At times during this season I think it would have maybe affected our team and we maybe would start to cheat offensively, but I didn’t see that at all today,” Fowler said. “I thought we continued to stay with it. Tip your hat to him. He played a heck of a game, made some big saves early. But we knew that if we stuck with it, we stuck with our forecheck, you could kind of tell toward the end of the second period, you felt like something was going to turn and something was going to come. Credit our guys for sticking with it.”
Jakob Silfverberg scored an empty-netter goal with just over a minute left in regulation.
“It’s about putting the puck in the net, and we refused to do that,” Gallant said. “We had some great opportunities in the first period; we ended up with four or five shots in the first, but we keep passing up shots to put fancy passes and they never work. You’ve got to put pucks on the net, you have to go to the net, and we refused to do that.”
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