In St Paul,Mason Marchment hit for a hat trick on Friday night to lead the Florida Panthers to a 6-2 win over the Minnesota Wild.
“Got to celebrate with the boys,” Marchment said. “It was awesome.”
Sergei Bobrovsky made 23 saves in the Panthers win.
“It’s another big win for us,” Bobrovsky said. “…We have great guys, we have deep lineups. Each game someone is stepping up with a huge performance for us.”
Kirill Kaprizov and Mats Zuccarello were the Wild strikers.
“We were unintelligent,” Wild head coach Dean Evason said. “We never talk about obviously being better than a team or whatever, but we weren’t worse than that team tonight. We just made worse mistakes. Our start was great. Our energy level was great. The way we competed, how we were playing the game. We turned the puck over and another mistake on the second one and third. Then it snowballed on us.
“They’re too good a team to come back on like that even though we fought at the end. But it’s uncharacteristic. … It’s a good chance for us to hopefully get the attention quickly and turn it around.”
Aaron Ekblad added a single marker off the power play, for the Panthers.
Florida improved to 34-10-5.
Anthony Duclair also scored for Florida.
Minnesota dropped to 30-13-3.
The Panthers’ Carter Verhaeghe added a late empty-net goal for ta 5-2 count.
Marchment added a second empty-net strike to complete his hat trick.
“It was fun to see him get a hat trick,” Panthers coach Andrew Brunette said. “He had so many good chances the other night in Columbus to get it and didn’t get it so I’m glad he got rewarded tonight.
“[Marchment’s] playing with a lot of confidence right now and his line’s got a lot of good chemistry together and I think they enjoy playing with each other. They’re taking advantage of it. He’s been an unbelievable stretch. He’s just producing at a surreal number right now and it’s fun to see. The confidence is oozing out of him. And he’s so strong on the puck.”
Cam Talbot made 28 saves in the Wild loss.
“Just the fourth one, I wasn’t really happy with. That one’s on me,” Talbot said. “Right now we’re making a few too many errors in our zone, myself included, and it’s costing us now.”
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