In Sunrise, four straight goals from the Florida Panthers to open the game sent them to a 6-2 thumping of the visiting Minnesota Wild on Friday night.
Aleksander Barkov assisted on five of the six goals scored by the Panthers.
“It was probably the toughest loss we ever had, 30 seconds away from a perfect 60-minute game against a really good team,” Barkov said. “Coming here, we had two choices: either forget about the last game and play as hard as we could this game, or just feel sorry about ourselves. I think we really played our butts off and deserved the win.”
Aleksander Barkov had five assists in Florida win – file photo by Lewis Bleiman
Sam Montembeault picked up his first win in the NHL, he made 25 saves for the victory.
“I was feeling a lot better today,” Montembeault said. “I knew what to expect and I knew the level of play. I just got in and tried to play my game and it ended up going very well.”
MacKenzie Weegar and Mike Matheson struck for two goals apiece in the win.
“I haven’t been shooting the puck a lot lately,” Weegar said. “I shot a couple tonight and they went in so maybe I should keep shooting the puck. You just got to keep sticking with it. I’ve always told myself defense leads to offense so just playing good defense and hopefully I can get that offensive confidence back and keep going and learn.”
It was an assist kind of night with Jonathan Huberdeau adding three assists of his own to go along with a goal.
“When we can help out, obviously it helps the forwards out a lot,” Weegar said. “They can sort of play a little looser and [Matheson], that’s what he does. He can get up in the play pretty quick and put one behind you pretty fast. It’s not a surprise by [Matheson] tonight.”
The Wild had their eight-game point streak end with the loss.
J.T. Brown and Marcus Foligno were the Wild strikers.
“Obviously we didn’t have the same kind of jump that we had against Tampa,” Wild head coach Bruce Boudreau said. “Those are the things that make coaches go nuts because we needed it and we didn’t show up.”
Mike Hoffman also scored for the Panthers.
“It was a great response. I was a little worried about it, to be honest. It would have been easy to come here today and feel sorry for ourselves and be down and pout a little bit, but we didn’t do that,” Panthers head coach Bob Boughner saud after the win.
[WATCH: All Wild vs. Panthers highlights]
Devan Dubnyk got the start but was was given the hook in the first intermission; he made four saves in the three-goal first period.
“You’d like to think that after beating the best team in the League that we would come back with a better performance than we did. But it didn’t happen,” Zach Parise said.
Alex Stalock made 19 saves in the final 40 minutes of the game.
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