In Sunrise, the Panthers defeated the Detroit Red Wings, 5-2, on Thursday for their 12th straight win.
Florida improved to 56-15-6, and have not lost a match since late March.
Sergei Bobrovsky made 27 saves in the Florida win.
Mason Marchment, Aleksander Barkov, and Noel Acciari had goals for the Panthers.
“He’s (Marchment) been really good lately,” Florida coach Andrew Brunette said. “He’s been great all year. He’s had a tremendous hockey season. He’s a force. With the puck, I don’t know if it’s a magnet to him, but it follows him around. You can’t get it off him, and if you do, he gets it back right away. Kind of epitomizes his goal. I mean, that epitomizes ‘Marchie’ in general just how that went in and was kind of reckless and all over the place and it works.”
Sam Gagner and Tyler Bertuzzi were the Red Wings strikers.
“It took us a while to get going, which kind of is expected,” Brunette said. “There’s a lot of hockey games right now and they played really well early. I thought they skated, they played fast. They were in our face and I don’t know how committed we were early to play and then I thought we got a little physical in the second and we seemed to get a little momentum and kind of took over the hockey game.”
Detroit dropped to 0-38-10.
“We’re under-manned right now,” Red Wings coach Jeff Blashill said. “I thought we had to play the right way and played a good first period, and then it’s 3-1 and that’s unfortunate. We have to be perfect in our game and we weren’t.”
MacKenzie Weegar also scored for the Panthers, his strike came in the middle frame to give them a 4-2 lead after Detroit had pulled to within one goal.
“It means a lot,” Weegar said. “We put a lot of hard work into the season and locking up the division is a big accomplishment for us. But there’s obviously the bigger picture here and we’ll enjoy that, locking up division and getting the home-ice advantage for the playoffs here. But other than that, we’re just trying to build our game and have fun while we’re doing it.”
Sam Reinhart scored off the power play early in the third period for the 5-2 final.
“The defensive game has been big for us,” Weegar said. “We want to be on the right side of the puck all the time and ‘Bob’ has been great. It’s nice not to have to come back all the time.”
Alex Nedeljkovic made 22 saves in the Detroit loss.
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