Isles sweep season from Panthers

Posted on by

In Sunrise, the New York Islanders improved to 21-7-2 with a 4-1 win over the Panthers on Thursday night.

Thomas Greiss made 32 saves to get the win.

Thomas Greiss had 32 saves in Isles win – file photo by Lewis Bleiman

“We hung on a few times,” New York coach Barry Trotz said. “They’ve got a really good team and obviously (coach) Joel [Quenneville has] got them playing well this year. They were hard to handle. We’ve been fortunate that our goaltender has been outstanding in the games and we were able to keep their power play in check for the most part in the games. That’s big too.”

Mike Hoffman scored the Panthers’ lone goal.

“This game, we didn’t create enough good scoring chances,” Panthers’  Aleksander Barkov said. “We had a couple, but not as much as we wanted. We’ve just got to play better offensively and play a little bit less time in our own zone because we’ve been playing for a while now too much time in our zone. We’ve just got to get in the offensive zone and stay there.”

Devon Toews and Mathew Barzal scored off the the power-play for the Isles and Anders Lee added a third period goal to complete t5he scoring.

“Every night, I see Greiss going, [Semyon Varlamov], it doesn’t matter, we play in front of them,” the Isles’ Jordan Eberle said. “The whole [defense] are going and it seems we just roll on. So it’s tough to really get too high and get too much of an ego. You have to put yourself and your egos aside and play within the structure and play the mentality that we have, and we’ve been winning hockey games doing it. We want to continue to do that. And when the special teams start to click on top of that, we’ll be a tough team to beat.”

[WATCH: All Islanders vs. Panthers highlights]

Sergei Bobrovsky made 27 saves in the loss.

“They’re a really good team,” Barkov said. “They play really well. They stay on the pucks and play the right way all the time, the whole 60 minutes. They don’t [make] mistakes and we’ve got to learn from that. We’ve got to play the same way. We’ve got to play a simple game just like they do and try to stay in the offensive zone as much as possible.”