Playoff Takeaways: Panthers’ power play lights up Bruins, Florida claims series lead

After trading blowout wins with Boston through Games 1 and 2 of their second-round battle, the Florida Panthers put their stamp on the series with a second straight rout in Game 3, dominating the Bruins so thoroughly, they had the TD Garden crowd raining boos down on the home side 40 minutes into the night.

The 2023 Stanley Cup runners-up stumbled into this series after bouncing the rival Tampa Bay Lightning in a quick five games in Round 1, the Cats enduring a 5-1 drubbing at the hands of the Bruins, on home ice, to kick things off in Game 1. Two nights later, they managed to level the playing field, coming out flying in Game 2 and earning a 6-1 win of their own.

On Friday, as the series shifted to Boston for Game 3, the Bruins fumbled their chance to keep the pendulum swinging back and forth, instead ending up on the wrong side of a 6-2 loss that granted Florida a 2-1 series lead.

With the B’s seemingly on the ropes and the Cats picking up steam again, here’s a look at how the Panthers earned their first lead of the second round.

ROUGH START, NO ‘JUICE’ FROM BRUINS EARLY

In the wake of his club’s lacklustre showing in Game 2, Bruins head coach Jim Montgomery summed his team’s effort level succinctly. “We didn’t have juice tonight,” the coach said post-game that evening.

Friday morning, hours before they took the ice for Game 3, he thought he’d seen a change in his group.

“I liked our team this morning,” the coach said before puck-drop. “You know, they’re calm, focused. I think, tonight, the juices will get going.”

Well, they didn’t.

After a brutal performance two nights earlier, the Bruins endured about as rough an opening 20 minutes as they could’ve to begin Game 3.

Captain Brad Marchand took a brutal hit that sent him flying into the boards, and labouring to the bench. Offensive talisman David Pastrnak absorbed a similar bone-crushing check himself, and later took a puck up high too, No. 88 also sent back to the bench in pain. Star netminder Jeremy Swayman found himself undone on a comical game-opener, the puck flying high in the air after an Evan Rodrigues deflection, before eventually bouncing in off the scrambling netminder.

By the end of Period 1, Boston not only found itself down 1-0, but had little to show for its own offensive efforts, the club managing just three shots on Sergei Bobrovsky to Florida’s 13.

The next period didn’t go much better — it took until nearly halfway through the night for the Bruins to get to five shots, and even then, a number came from sharp angles, or from distance. Through 40 minutes, the shots sat at 24-8, Florida managing more shots in each of the first two periods than Boston did in the opening two combined.

The crowd packing the TD Garden took notice, sending their team off the ice with a chorus of boos.

BOSTON FEELS THE WEIGHT OF BENNETT’S ENTRANCE INTO SERIES

Sidelined with an upper-body injury since Game 2 of the first round, human wrecking ball Sam Bennett made his Round 2 debut Friday, returning to the Panthers’ lineup for Game 3. And it didn’t take long for the former Calgary Flame to make his presence known.

That hefty check on Marchand that sent him to the bench in pain? That was courtesy of Bennett.

The stiff check on Pastrnak? Also Bennett.

The Holland Landing, Ont., product finished the night with a game-high seven hits while playing just under 13 minutes, the fourth-fewest sum among all Panthers forwards, and registered an assist on the team’s second goal of the night, too.

Bennett’s physicality wound up having an especially immense impact on the night in the third — and potentially on the series as a whole — as Marchand wound up unable to return to the game in the third period after taking that check in the first, and trying to play through it in the second.

For a Bruins group already struggling offensively of late, the potential loss of Marchand — Boston’s leading post-season scorer with 10 points through nine games — for any extended period of time, would be a devastating blow.

PANTHERS FEASTING ON SPECIAL TEAMS IN ROUND 2

It should be no mystery, by this point, that special-teams success is essential to finding any larger, meaningful success in the post-season. Look through the clubs that have come up short in the special-teams battle to this point and you’ll find a list of most of the teams who were bounced from the dance in Round 1.

The Bruins were among the group that won that battle in the opening round, scoring six power-play goals against Toronto while holding the Maple Leafs to just one man-advantage goal. Against Florida, though, that script has been flipped dramatically — and Friday night, the Panthers put an exclamation mark on their power-play dominance.

Through two games, the Cats already had the edge, having scored once on the man-advantage in Game 2, that marker the only power-play goal from either side to that point. In Game 3, they simply couldn’t stop filling the net, piling up an absurd four power-play goals on the Bruins to turn the tilt into an all-out rout.

It was when the goals came that truly sunk the Bruins, though.

Down 1-0 midway through the night, Boston had managed to hold on despite getting heavily outshot and offering little in the way of an attack themselves. Then the Bruins gifted Florida four minutes of man-advantage time, as Mason Lohrei was tagged with a high-sticking double minor. The Panthers struck twice, running the score up to 3-0 before Boston had even managed a single meaningful chance.

Back out for the third, looking to right the ship, the Bruins then sent Florida right back to the man-advantage two minutes into the frame. Florida struck again, running it up to 4-0. And just to add salt to the wound as the game wrapped up, Florida having weathered a brief Bruins push, the Panthers snagged one more power-play goal in the final minute.

BRUINS’ LATE PUSH SIMPLY TOO LITTLE, TOO LATE

Still, in the third, the Bruins did push, and find life, and look — if just for a moment — like they might pull a Canucks-esque comeback.

Jake DeBrusk was at the heart of the revived effort, setting up a Jakub Lauko tally five minutes into the third, and then striking himself a few minutes later, cutting the lead to 4-2. 

The quick pair of goals — scored in two of the team’s first three shots of the period — seemed to galvanize the Bruins. The home side started linking together some promising sequences, hunkering down in the offensive zone, forcing Bobrovsky to make some game-saving stops.

But by the time that push came, the night was already lost, the hole too great to dig themselves out of. Here’s some context for just how long it took for Boston to find its game: Between the six straight goals scored by Florida to end Game 2, and the four straight tallied to start Game 3, the Cats put up 10 unanswered goals against the B’s, the longest stretch from any team in these playoffs. 

The last team to put up that many unanswered in the playoffs? The Avalanche, in 2022, en route to a Cup win.

Their brief signs of life aside, it was a rough showing for Montgomery and the Bruins faithful. Now, a daunting task awaits them in Game 4, Boston having to hope it can channel its Game 1 performance next time out, that Marchand will be in the lineup, that the TD Garden atmosphere might be enough to rattle these Cats at some point.

To hear Florida’s Brandon Montour tell it, though, his Panthers don’t look likely to bend under the pressure any time soon.

“It’s just our locker room, the guys we have on our team, no matter where it is,” Montour told Sportsnet’s Kyle Bukauskas post-game. “We enjoy it — you know, water bottles, towels, rats thrown on the ice. Guys got a kick out of it. But, again, we keep pushing forward, and we build on the next one.

“We know what it takes, especially at this time of year. Mentally, the ups and downs of a series, the ups and downs of a whole game — the guys do such a tremendous job of sticking with it, no matter the outcome, and focusing on that next one.”