In Anaheim, Anthony Stolarz made 34 saves on Friday night to help the Florida Panthers to a 2-1 win over the Ducks.
“He was, I think, our best player, for sure,” Florida’s Anton Lundell said. “He did some big saves and kept us in the game. We needed some big saves in some key moments, and we got them from him. Luckily, we were able to get the win with two goals.”
The Panthers improved to 11-5-1.
The Panthers took a 2-0 lead in the first period on goals from etu Luostarinen and Oliver Ekman-Larsson .
Luostarinen struck at 4:40 of the first to give the Panthers a 1-0 lead.
Ekman-Larsson pushed the advantage to 2-0 with less than two minutes left in the period.
The Ducks dropped to 9-8-0.
“This team’s funny, like we go in spurts,” Ducks coach Greg Cronin said. “There’s a fearlessness and a drive to our game when we have that in our minds, and you saw that in the third period.”
Anaheim’s Frank Vatrano scored his 12th of the season at 7:38 of the third to get the Ducks within one at 2-1. His goal was off the power play.
“It felt like the ice was shifting our way in the third,” Ducks forward Jakob Silfverberg said. “We kept having scoring chance after scoring chance.”
A game-tying goal was waved off after video review.
“I saw the same thing that 15, 16,000 people saw and I have to respect what they saw in Toronto, I guess,” Cronin said. “I’m looking at the monitor and there’s multiple angles. I look at [the Panthers] bench and it looked like they were getting ready to play a 2-2 game.”
John Gibson made 33 saves in the loss.
“We weren’t very good, let’s be honest, the first couple periods, we were lucky it was only 2-0,” Cronin said. “We had two breakaways that were off our penalty kill and if our penalty hadn’t been so good, it wouldn’t have gotten to the controversial ending.”
You must be logged in to post a comment.