In Sunrise, Alex Lyon made 29 saves and the Panthers downed the Minnesota Wild, 5-3 on Saturday night.
It was his first start of the season.
“Good for him,” Florida coach Paul Maurice said. “A battler. His personality’s what you see in the net. He’s scrambling, he’s fighting for pucks. Every time he makes a save the bench goes crazy and it sems to be right now, very possibly the energy we need.
“A guy like that, playing the way he’s playing, where we’re looking for anywhere we can get some juice, some fuel in the tank, and he seems to be driving that.”
The Panthers improved to 23-20-5.
“A lot of guys went down today,” Lyon said. “To me, these are the kind of games you play for. So many guys digging in, playing with five defensemen, massive points on the line. To me, this is fun, and this is where you get to test your true mettle.”
Anton Lundell staked the Panthers to a 1-0 lead in the first period, Eetu Luostarinen pushed the lead to 2-0 in the second period.
“It feels really good to win,” Lundell said. “Overall, it’s been better now. We go to the game, we have the confidence. Me and my line are trying to show and lead the way. Overall, this just feels like we battle. We’ve found a way to play when we’re one goal under, and way to play when we have the lead.”
Matt Boldy scored off the power play to get one back for the Wild at 2-1, but Carter Verhaeghe scored to give the Panthers their two-goal lead again.
The Wild’s Joel Eriksson Ek scored off the power play for Minnesota to cut the lead to 3-2, before Gustav Forsling restored the advantage for the Panthers at 4-2.
The Wild dropped to 25-16-4.
“We battled hard like we always do,” Minnesota defenseman Calen Addison said. “We played a full 60. I don’t think some of the bounces went our way. That’s hockey. I think we’ve just got to tighten up. Less turnovers. Maybe less penalties. I don’t know. There’s no real answer.”
The Wild’s Jared Spurgeon scored with just under 90 seconds left in the game to make it 4-3.
“We actually liked our game pretty much the whole night,” Wild coach Dean Evason said. “Obviously we didn’t get the results, and we didn’t score enough. … [At] 5-on-5 here tonight we didn’t find a way to score. … If you’re not scoring, you’ve got to continually work at keeping it out of our net, and we didn’t here tonight.”
Sam Reinhart added a late empty-net goal for the 5-3 final.
“That’s our job is to go out there and be game-changers,” Addison said of the power play. “When it’s not clicking … it can cost us or take some of the momentum, confidence away from our team. I think our job is to go out there and know what our task at hand is.”
Filip Gustavsson made 22 saves in the Minnesota loss.
You must be logged in to post a comment.