SUNRISE, Fla. _ It was an eventful game No. 82 for the Devils and Panthers but when it was all said and done it was New Jersey walking off the ice with a 4-3 overtime win, Saturday night at BB&T Center.
The Devils blew a 3-1 lead in the third period after the game took a physical turn but Travis Zajac salvaged one final point for the 2018-19 season when he beat Roberto Luongo from the slot with a power play goal 56 seconds into overtime. It may very well end up being the final goal scored on the veteran netminder, as he's dodged rumors of retirement all season.
Nathan Bastian scored twice for the first two-goal game of his NHL career and Pavel Zacha closed out a forgettable season with a goal to remember in the second period. Mackenzie Blackwood made 37 saves.
The fireworks broke out in the third period when Michael McLeod and Josh Brown dropped the gloves. A few minutes later, Miles Wood got tied up with Denis Malgin in the crease and the two of them collided with Blackwood. Wood retaliated on Malgin and he received a 10-minute game misconduct penalty, effectively ending his season early. A third scrum saw Nico Hischier and Will Btucher tossed with misconduct penalties.
The Panthers' tactic to fire up the squad and push for a tie worked. The Devils were down three of their best players after all of the fracases ceased. New Jersey was forced to use players who don't typically close games and the results were predictable: Jonathan Huberdeau and Mike Hoffman scored within two minutes of one another at 16:35 and 18:35, tying the game and sending into one last bonus period of the season.
Shortly after Aleksander Barkov cut the New Jersey lead in half with a fantastic no-look goal at 11:58 in the second, Zacha was whistled for a hooking penalty. Just as he skated out of the box, Kevin Rooney fed him from the wall, finding him in open ice. Zacha dangled around Aaron Ekblad and around a diving Luongo, chipping it over his pad to give the Devils a 3-1 lead.
Bastian's first goal came 1:27 into play, when Nico Hischier made a smart move to get past Ekblad and slide a feed over to Bastian at the edge of the circle. Bastian buried the one-timer.
But the ice tilted in favor of the Panthers through the rest of the first period and the Devils didn't record a shot on goal for the final 18:08. They had a goal disallowed when Drew Stafford batted a slap shot by Kenny Agostino past Luongo with a high stick and Florida took control from there.
Bastian, who was again in the right place at the right time, tipped in a pass from Egor Yakovlev at 7:41 in the second to put New Jersey up 2-0.
It might have been a meaningless game in the grand scheme of things but it's clear that neither one of these teams is happy with how it ended. Big things were predicted for both teams and none of those things came to fruition.
