SUNRISE, Fla. — Andrew Brunette was worried the game would play out the way it did. His Florida Panthers were fresh off a week-long road trip, one in which the offense wasn’t playing up to its top-of-the-league standards and one in which they won just one of three games.
They were set to face a “young” and “carefree” team in the Ottawa Senators that despite being near the bottom of the standings came into FLA Live Arena winners of four of their last five including victories over the Tampa Bay Lightning, Colorado Avalanche and Carolina Hurricanes.
Brunette didn’t want his team to fall into a trap.
“It’s always you get off the road and that first game at home ... I don’t know if you lose a little focus or you’re running around doing things, but it’s always a tough one,” Brunette said after the team’s morning skate.
The Panthers were playing catch-up from the start and tied the game twice but a two-goal flurry from Ottawa in the span of 80 seconds late in the second period gave Ottawa the lead for good before an all-out thrashing in the third period turned the game into an 8-2 Florida loss on Tuesday.
The eight goals were the most allowed by the Panthers this season and the most allowed by goaltender Spencer Knight in his young NHL career, topping the six goals he gave up on Nov. 9 in the Panthers’ road loss to the New Jersey Devils.
It was just the Panthers’ second loss in 16 home games this season. The other came against the Seattle Kraken, meaning the Panthers’ two losses on home ice came against two of the bottom six teams in the league standings.
The Panthers (18-6-4) were sluggish from the start and couldn’t generate consistent momentum. They went almost six minutes until their first shot on goal and were outshot 10-3 in the first 10 minutes of play, falling behind 1-0 on an Austin Watson wrist shot off a rebound less than five minutes into the game.
Their power play struggles continued, with the Panthers failing to score on any of their six opportunities with the man advantage. They put just nine shots on goal in those situations and allowed a shorthanded goal on a Dylan Gambrell breakaway early in the second period to give the Senators a 2-1 lead. Florida entered Tuesday with just an 18.8-percent success rate on the power play.
Now, the Panthers did tie the game twice. It was Jonathan Huberdeau first, taking a drop pass in the slot from Sam Reinhart and flicking a wrist shot past Anton Forsberg to make the score 1-1 with 6:55 left in the first period.
Reinhart then leveled the score again with 4:27 left in the second after corralling a rebound on an Anton Lundell shot from the slot.
But the Senators (9-16-1) took the lead for good 33 seconds later when Josh Norris’ wrist shot went past Knight to make it 3-2 with 3:48 left in the second period. Tim Stuzle gave Ottawa its first multi-goal lead of the game 80 seconds later, and the Senators added four more goals in the third period — one by Norris, one by Drake Batherson and two by Nick Paul on the power play — to complete the rout.
The Panthers host the Los Angeles Kings on Thursday to wrap up a short two-game homestand.
This and that
— The Panthers’ lineup Tuesday was a jumbled one. Anthony Duclair returned after missing eight games, but Aleksander Barkov sat out for the 11th time in the past 12 games — the first eight with a knee injury, the past three with an upper-body injury he sustained in his first game back against the St. Louis Blues on Dec. 7. Florida also played without fourth-line winger Ryan Lomberg (COVID-19 protocols) and defenseman Gustav Forsling (flu). With Maxim Mamin still day-to-day, Florida called up forward Aleksi Heponiemi from their AHL affiliate in Charlotte to take Lomberg’s spot on the fourth line.
— With his first-period goal, Huberdeau has now produced at least one point in 12 of the Panthers’ last 14 games. He has seven goals and 12 assists in that span.
