Comeback win puts Panthers atop division
Jonathan Huberdeau had a three-point night and Chris Driedger was strong in net as the Panthers rallied from a 2-0 deficit to beat Carolina in overtime.
The first-place Florida Panthers? That has a nice ring to it.
It became reality Wednesday.
The Panthers rallied from an early two-goal deficit to defeat the Carolina Hurricanes 4-3 in overtime at Raleigh’s PNC Arena and take sole possession of first place in the Central Division one-fourth of the way through this 56-game season.
The Panthers are now 10-2-2 and have 22 points through 14 games. The Tampa Bay Lightning, at 10-3-1 (21 points), and the Hurricanes, also at 10-3-1 (21 points), are tied for second in the eight-team division.
“Really good start to the season,” said Panthers coach Joel Quenneville, whose team also won two of three against the Lightning in the days before facing the Hurricanes. “A lot of good things have happened here across the board.”
Jonathan Huberdeau scored the winning goal with 2:31 left in the five-minute overtime.
Fitting, considering Huberdeau and goaltender Chris Driedger played big roles in the Panthers’ comeback.
Huberdeau cut Florida’s deficit to 2-1 with a power-play goal midway through the second period, sending a snipe from the left circle past Alex Nedeljkovic. Just over three minutes into the third period, shortly after the Panthers killed off a penalty, Huberdeau sent a no-look, spin-orama pass from the right circle
across the ice to Alex Wennberg, who tapped the puck into the net to make it 2-2.
“You just have to be at the right moment,” Huberdeau said of the pass. “I saw Wenny coming in and I’ve done the little spin-o-rama before and it just hit his stick, so it was fortunate.”
His coach had much higher praise.
“The pass was the highlight for me,” Quenneville said. “It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a play like that.”
Florida’s Juho Lammikko and Carolina’s Vincent Trocheck exchanged goals less than a minute and a half apart to keep things even at the end of regulation before Huberdeau scored on a breakaway in overtime.
Wednesday was Huberdeau’s third game this season with at least three points and he leads the team with 20 points overall through 14 games.
“It was a big response by us,” Huberdeau said. “After the first period, we just came back in the room, we didn’t panic and we came back to our structure . ... Got some good goals.”
Driedger, meanwhile, fought off flurry after flurry from an uptempo, aggressive Hurricanes offense in the opening period, 16 chances in all during those first 20 minutes. For the most part, he held his own before the Hurricanes struck twice in a 22-second span late in the frame.
Jordan Staal’s wrist shot in the slot between MacKenzie Weegar and Aaron Ekblad gave the Hurricanes a 1-0 edge with 1:32 left in the first period. On the ensuing shift, Sebastian Aho deflected Brett Pesce’s shot from the point into the net to make it 2-0.
Trocheck’s power-play goal was Dreidger’s only other miss as he stopped 32 of 35 shots on goal — including a big stop on Nino Niederreiter in the paint with three minutes left — to improve to 5-1-1 on the season.
FAMILIAR FACE
The Panthers had a familiar face on the opposite side of the ice Wednesday.
For the first time since they traded him to the Hurricanes almost a year ago, the Panthers faced off against veteran center Trocheck.
Trocheck spent the first 61⁄2 seasons of his NHL career with the Panthers, who selected him 64th overall in the 2011 NHL Draft. He recorded 284 points (112 goals, 172 assists) during his Florida tenure.
“I’ve watched the highlights and seen him in the uniform,” Huberdeau said after practice Tuesday. “He’s a good friend, but it’s part of the business. Guys get traded. It was tough when he left that day, but now you get used to it. We’re still friends and we’ll be friends for a long time.”
Trocheck has been a force for the Hurricanes, entering Wednesday tied for second on the Carolina roster with 13 points (six goals, seven assists).
“I have definitely been looking forward to playing them,” Trocheck told Carolina reporters Tuesday. “It’s going to be a little weird, but once you get on the ice it’s just hockey.”
FORSLING RETURNS
Defenseman Gustav Forsling returned to the lineup Wednesday after spending the last nine games on injured reserve with an upper-body injury. He primarily played with Anton Stralman, who regularly has played with the final defenseman Quenneville rotates in and out of the lineup (Markus Nutivaara is the other player who generally fits that category).
Ekblad and Weegar remain the team’s top pairing, while Radko Gudas and Keith Yandle are mainly grouped together. The lone exception comes when Noah Juulsen is in the lineup. At that point, Juulsen pairs with Yandle and Gudas works with Stralman.
NEXT UP
The Panthers close this four-game, three-city road trip with back-to-back games against the Detroit Red Wings on Friday (7 p.m. start) and Saturday (5 p.m. start). The Panthers are 3-1-0 against the Red Wings through four games this season.
Kate Winslet is playing a police detective on TV, and that’s where her crime-busting ambition ends.
“I’d be a (expletive) lousy detective. I’d be very good at the coffee and the beers, definitely,” Winslet said of her role on HBO’s “Mare of Easttown,” debuting in April. “I don’t think I have the mental stamina that is required. I have stamina, but in a different way.”
Winslet plays Mare Sheehan, who is investigating a murder in her small, closeknit Pennsylvania town while struggling to keep her family
life intact. The limited series’ cast includes Julianne Nicholson, Jean Smart, Evan Peters and Guy Pearce.
Winslet said her character felt in many ways “a million miles away from me” in the nature of her work and its demands.
But she found an important connection with Mare in her “real sense of family and how much it means to her to hold that together at all costs, and also to be able to admit to herself from time to time that she has failed in a lot of areas and try desperately to correct those errors.”
The British actor has used an impressive variety of accents in her career, including a German one for her Oscarwinning role in 2008’s “The
Reader.” But she found it a real challenge to match the regional Pennsylvania sound needed in “Mare of Easttown,”
“It was up there among the hardest accents I’ve ever done,” she told TV critics during a Q&A. “I’d say it’s up there in the top three for sure. But it adds so much so much to Mare’s character. I didn’t want to come up with something that was sort of generalized and make a few kind of token sounds that were a nod in the direction” of the dialect.
The seven-episode “Mare of Easttown” debuts April 18 on HBO and will be on streaming service HBO Max.