The Panthers improved to 2-1-0 on their current four-game homestand

Considering they were playing without their top two centers and top two defensemen, the Florida Panthers did a good job collecting two points on Tuesday night.

Florida entered training camp knowing they would be missing Aaron Ekblad and Brandon Montour for a couple months, but then they lost Sam Bennett in the Cats second-to-last preseason game when he suffered a lower-body injury.

It's a tall order to remove those three players from a lineup and ask a team to perform at a high level, but things went even more sideways when Florida Captain Sasha Barkov was ruled out of the game after falling ill.

Mounting obstacles be darned, the Panthers still came away with a big win on home ice, defeating the San Jose Sharks 3-1 to get back to .500 on the young season.

Here are THN Florida's three takeaways from the victory:

A great debut for Anthony Stolarz

Stolarz looked just as good in a game as he has during the past month of practices. He’s big in the net and plays with very little wasted movement. 

For such a big man, he’s smooth with side-to-side movements and had no problems with explosive pushes with needed. 

He’s athletic, he battles and stays in the play, and his rebound control was on point. It’s only one game, but in that game, Stolarz checked all the boxes.

“To be off that long and be that solid, but he's earned it, because he worked really hard and he did it straight through camp,” said Panthers Head Coach Paul Maurice. “He knows the job, so he knows those practices have to be his games, and he really prepared himself very well. He looked in the net tonight the way he has in practice. He’s a big man but efficient, and there’s not a lot of scramble to his game. He was really good. He made some really good saves.”

Another late 6-on-4 to kill, and Florida did

Maurice has said several times over the past week or so that he’s liked what he’s seen from Florida’s penalty kill despite the unit not having the numbers to back it up.

It’s seemed like a trend for the Panthers to have to kill off a late game, 6-on-4 penalty, and it happened again on Tuesday.

With San Jose trailing by a goal and Eetu Luostarinen in the penalty box with 4:10 to go, the Sharks pulled goaltender Mackenzie Blackwood and took the two-man advantage.

Despite being without arguably the team’s top two penalty killing forwards, the Cats got the job done.

“We needed it,” Maurice said. “With Lousty in the box and Barkov out, (Matthew Tkachuk) filled in, so we’ve been fighting for it. We got 1:55 of the first one killed, but it’s in your mind now. Confidence is just as important on the penalty kill as it is on the power play, so good for those men. They can feel good about that.”

Anton Lundell saves the day at the faceoff dot

In a game where Florida struggled mightily in the faceoff circle, Lundell came up with a big time performance. He won six of his nine draws, including three of his four offensive zone starts.

Lundell has quietly been quite good all season when it comes to winning faceoffs.

Through six games, he’s won 57.1% of his draws, and that includes an ugly 1-of-9 afternoon in Winnipeg, In Lundell’s five other games, he’s an impressive 31-for47. That’s a 65.9% success rate, which would be tops in the NHL. 

“He was the lone strong faceoff man,” Maurice said. “If you’re critiquing the game, we struggled in the faceoff circle and he became very, very necessary as the game went on to take some defensive draws, so he was good.”

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