South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
Channeling anger
With shootout victory, Panthers put things together after recent bad stretch
SUNRISE — Good teams don’t excuse failure. They explain it. And so there was Aleksander Barkov, Saturday’s hero with two goals, the veteran captain who could have sugar-coated it all, barely addressing the good news of a 3-2 shootout win against Detroit.
“We didn’t like our first period,’’ Barkov said. “We had some chances, but that wasn’t our game.”
That’s how it’s been too much this recent run for the Panthers, too.
“We didn’t play the right way,’’ Barkov said.
Hear that sound? It’s unmistakable. It’s the sound of a team regulating itself, of players measuring themselves against proper standards beyond a regular-season scoreboard. That’s how works on winning teams.
Coach Paul Maurice said he gave his, “best talk,” of the season between the second and third periods Saturday.
“I didn’t say anything,’’ he said. He let the players talk. This is how they’re using a bad stretch to get good. The Panthers are viewing this 2-5-1 stretch that’s been complete with sloppy plays and uncharacteristic mistakes as an invitation to improve. Now can they do it?
“They were starting to feel it,’’ Maurice said.
Feel the losses from this recent stretch, he meant. Feel the frustration, too. The combination led to something Maurice sounded delighted to see on Saturday: Anger. Good, old-fashioned, adrenaline-rising anger on ice.
“It’s hard to get to that level of anger,’’ Maurice said.
That took the Panthers’ play to a level of intensity missing of late. It stood out on every shift of Aaron Ekblad – “A man possessed,’’ Barkov said. It was there in winning little battles that are part of big wins.
It also showed in the emotion of the celebration after Ekblad came out of the penalty box and willed his way with the puck to the front of Detroit’s net. The puck then slid to an open Barkov, who had an open net to tie 1-1 in the third period.
It wasn’t perfect from there to Sam Reinhart’s shootout goal to
deliver the win. Just ask Reinhart. He equally praised the team for a, “good job of staying composed,” and then said they, “certainly didn’t do a good job of staying out of the (penalty) box.”
He added, “We found a way and that’s important.”
The one constant in any season is sudden change. A few weeks ago, the Panthers had won 16 of 18 games while averaging 3.83 goals and giving up as many as three goals just twice in games. They sat atop the Eastern Conference.
“The best team in hockey,’’ a national broadcast closed out a game
Then they lost their way. They can’t score, averaging 2.1 goals these last eight games. Their mighty defense has sprung a leak, too, as opponents have scored at last three goals in six of those games. Maurice changed lines to change fortunes, splitting up Barkov and Reinhart on the top line, for instance.
Some of it’s the ebb and flow of a long season. Some it’s the breaks they got on their winning stretch falling the other way. All of it can be useful to a team with big aspirations.
“Nobody likes losing,’’ Maurice said. “I’m not particularly worried about it. I’m not saying everything’s OK. I’m not saying that at all. There’s a bunch of messed-up things, but I know those we can fix. We just have to go through a difficult stretch to do it right
“It has to become uncomfortable enough that you’re willing, not so much to make a change, but uncomfortable enough to revert back to the hard things that you have to do because they are very hard.
“They’re so hard to do, as a matter of fact, that you can’t casually do them. Can’t sort of play. Even if you’re really, really smart and do all the right things with the puck and your position is perfect. You’re still a .500 team if you play that way.
“So, for us to be good, we have to hit a certain threshold of intensity and you need extra motivation possibly, if that’s the right word, to get there. You make the playoffs, you’re running hot, feeling pretty good – it’s hard to get to that level of anger.”
That’s what he liked about this win more than the win. The anger. It led to the intensity, which led to the Panthers looking like the Panthers again with eight regular-season games left before the playoffs.
As Maurice said, “I thought we started to feel it a little bit.”