Florida has lost consecutive games in regulation for the first time in 2024

It doesn’t happen often, but the Florida Panthers have dropped consecutive games in regulation.

Florida’s cross-state rivals from Tampa Bay jumped out to a big, early lead and leaned on their goaltender the rest of the way, defeating the Panthers 5-3 on Saturday in Sunrise.

Tampa went up 2-0 in the first period lead on goals by Steven Stamkos (20 seconds into the game) and Michael Eyssimont, who picked up his own rebound and scored after getting behind Florida’s defense and going in on a breakaway on Florida goaltender Sergei Bobrovsky.

Things would get worse for the home team before they began to get better.

The Lighting scored twice more during the first seven minutes of the second period to go up by four, the latter of which came after a Josh Mahura goal was called off and replaced by a Dmitry Kulikov match penalty for an illegal check to the head of Conor Sheary.

The packed house at Amerant Bank Arena was not happy, and quite loud about it.

With Tampa still on their five-minute power play, Matthew Tkachuk came storming down the right wing and muscled a wrist shot past Andrei Vasilevskiy to get the Panthers on the board.

Sam Reinhart’s 27th power play goal of the season cut the Lightning lead to 4-2 about four minutes later, and suddenly we had ourselves a game again.

From there it would be the Andrei Vasilevskiy show. He made several eye-popping saves, looking like the man who dominated the league for several years. 

Vasilevskiy finished with 47 saves, including eight on high danger shots, according to Natural Stat Trick. 

Reinhart scored again in the final minutes to make it a one-goal game, but a Nikita Kucherov empty-net goal would cement the loss for Florida.

On to Nashville.

Here are some thoughts and observations from Saturday’s battle with the Bolts:

With a goal and an assist, Tkachuk has eight points over his past six games.

The goal was Tkachuk’s first in his past nine outings.

Reinhart has scored nine goals over his past nine games. He’s up to 48 on the season.

After going 12 consecutive starts allowing two goals or less, Bobrovsky has now given up three or more in three straight outings. 

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