In Sunrise, the Panthers lost an opportunity to clinch a wild card spot in the Eastern Conference on Monday night.
They did move closer in a 2-2 overtime loss to the Toronto Maple Leafs.
“You hoped you could get to that last game and have a chance,” Florida coach Paul Maurice said. “You come out and you judge yourself by your performance and your preparation, and it was really, really good. We played a [heck] of a game.”
John Tavares scored in the extra session for the winner.
“I thought in terms of battling and being committed to the job tonight, nobody exemplified it better than Ilya,” Toronto coach Sheldon Keefe said. “He was awesome.”
Tavares scored off a breakaway with 22 seconds left on the clock in the extra session.
The Maple Leafs moved to 48-21-11, and had nothing to win or lose in the outcome.
Ilya Samsonov made 45 saves in the Toronto win.
“You’d like to win this game in regulation, but it is a desperate team on the other side,” Keefe said. “I thought we did a nice job. We made that one mistake in the third period and they scored on it, but aside from that, we really didn’t give them very much. There wasn’t much happening up until that point.”
Florida moved one point clear of the New York Islanders for the first wild card in the Eastern Conference.
The Panthers dropped to 42-31-8, and had a six-game win streak snapped.
The Maple Leafs took a 1-0 lead at 17:47 of the middle frame off a strike by Auston Matthews.
Florida tied it, 1-1, midway through the third period on a marker form Brandon Montour.
“We have all the confidence in this lineup,” Montour said. “It would have been nice to get that extra point, but we can’t dwell on that right now. We recover these next two days, and we’ll come play hard against Carolina here at home (on Thursday) and see what we can do.”
Alex Lyon made 23 saves in the loss.
“If we bring that effort, that’s all you can hope for,” Lyon said. “I guess my philosophy is just bring your best and let the chips fall where they may. If we bring that, we have nothing to be disappointed about. If we bring it again like that, it’s going to make us successful.”
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