It doesn't happen very often, but Florida was outplayed on Thursday night
It doesn't happen very often, but Florida was outplayed on Thursday night
The Florida Panthers have found a nice little patch of adversity to work through this week.
That’ll happen when you go from riding a nice, seven-game winning streak to dropping consecutive home games by a combined score of 10-3.
Florida couldn’t seem to get anything going against the visiting New Jersey Devils while simultaneously struggling in areas they generally thrive, such as with defensive zone coverage and on special teams.
It’s a good learning experience for Panthers Head Coach Paul Maurice and his team, but they better figure things out quickly because their next two games are against the best team in the NHL.
Here are Thursday’s takeaways:
SPECIAL TEAMS STRUGGLED
Winning the special teams batter is a major key to victory in the NHL, and the Devils couldn’t have done much better in that department on Thursday.
They opened the game with goals in each of their first three power play opportunities while holding Florida to a big fat donut on five chances with the man advantage.
Between failing to score the opening goal and not being able to get a kill when down a man, Florida was facing an uphill climb basically from the jump.
“A strength of ours has been our penalty killing,” Maurice said. “We need to get those kills. They moved the puck around, they've got a good power play. Getting a handle on it at times was a (problem), we left a gap on the third, kicked the second one in, so lots of small (things). There wouldn't have been a theme to it. It starts with the face off, and after that it went south.”
FACING LOSSES HEAD-ON
One thing that Maurice has prided both himself and his Panthers teams on over the past couple seasons is that they learn from their mistakes.
They might enjoy winning more, but they’ll learn more from a loss.
That’s why Maurice and his staff won’t shy away from diving into the tape and finding the bits and pieces of Florida’s game that wasn’t up to the standard that they’ve created for themselves.
“You’ve got to deal with it,” Maurice said. “We're not going to let it go. But there's no…you don't put a weight on it that it shouldn't carry. We haven't loved our last two, and you're not going to love them all. We’ve got to get to our game. We had about three shifts the second period I liked, that’s not a big number for our team.”
DEVILS WERE THE BETTER TEAM
At the end of the day, Florida just got out played.
They were getting cut off on their exits, they were losing boards battles and as we’ve mentioned, got shellacked on special teams.
To nobody’s surprise, Maurice gave an honest assessment afterwards.
“I thought they were better than we were,” he said. “I do. I thought they were quicker, faster, more sharper in their execution, but for us, that's not a usually a tell for how well we play. We were late on a bunch of things tonight, and that half step will kill you in this league.”
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