Perfect Panthers keep Coyotes winless

In Sunrise, the Florida Panthers continued their hot start and remained undefeated, 6-0-0 with a 5-3 win over the Arizona Coyotes on Monday night.

Spencer Knight made 18 saves in the win.

“We’re feeling good,” Florida’s Frank Vatrano (goal) said. “We’re confident. We know how good of a team we have, and we just need to keep going game by game and keep putting these ones up early.”

The Coyotes are 0-5-1 to start the season.

“You never hope to go through it, but we’re in the thick of it and there’s no easy way out,” Arizona’s Christian Fischer said. “It’s going to take a lot of work. It’s early but it [stinks].”

Liam O’Brien, Phil Kessel and Clayton Keller scored for the Coyotes.

Joe Thornton and Jonathan Huberdeau had goals for the Pathers.

“Yeah, it was great,” Thornton said. “Felt good. A good play by [Sam Reinhart] to kind of whack it over and it was just an open net so just put it in. Those are just worker goals. That’s where they’re scored these days and guys were willing to go there and it paid dividends.”

Aaron Ekblad scored for Florida and Anthony Duclair added an empty-net goal to ice the win.

“We knew going into it, it was kind of a dangerous opponent and I think that being respectful from start to finish is part of it,” Panthers head coach Joel Quenneville said. “Sometimes you get ahead, you get a little careless. We got a couple of situations that we misplayed and both ended up in the net, [then] it’s hockey game.

“We nailed it down at the end, but certainly don’t take anything for granted in this game.”

Florida was 2-for-3 on the power play.

“We need to find a solution on the PK,” Coyotes head coach Andre Tourigny said. “We need to block shots and become aggressive.”