In Washington, DC, the Capitals rallied from a 1-4 deficit on Thursday night to tie their match with the Florida Panthers, 4-4, and force extra time.
In the extra session, the Panthers’ Eetu Luostarinen scored the game winner for a 5-4 decision.
“He had a heck of a game and we really can trust him out there and he can make plays,” Panthers head coach Andrew Brunette said of Luostarinen. “He’s a very underrated player for us.”
Florida improved to 9-01 with the win.
Sergei Bobrovsky got the start for Florida, but left the game in the first intermission for an apparent upper-body injury; he made 13 saves.
Spencer Knight made 25 saves the rest of the way.
Aleksander Barkov had two goals for the Panthers; he and Aaron Ekblad scored to give the Panthers a 2-0 lead in the game.
“I don’t even think … I mean, that was an exhausting game,” Brunette said. “So I’m just [going to] enjoy this one. I know they’re a good team, and we’ll worry about that tomorrow morning.”
Alex Ovechkin and Tom Wilson scored in the middle frame to close the gap to 3-4, and Connor McMichael evened the game 4-4 in the third period.
“We have to take a point any way we can, but in the first period we didn’t play our game,” Ovechkin said. “After that we were pretty good. We knew when we scored the third goal we’d come back. We had lots of chances.”
Brandon Montour also scored for Florida.
Daniel Sprong also scored for the Caps.
“The guys played hard, they never stopped playing,” Caps head coacg Peter Laviolette said. “We found ourselves in a game where I thought we could have had the lead at times. We got to overtime and never really got possession of the puck. It’s frustrating to not get the second point.”
Ilya Samsonov was delayed getting into the game as the starter for undisclosed reasons. was announced as the Capitals starting goalie but missed the first 1:45 because of an undisclosed issue.
Samsonov left the game in the middle frame after the Panthers had taken a 3-1 lead; he made 15 saves.
Vitek Vanecek made 13 saves in the loss.
You must be logged in to post a comment.