SUNRISE, Fla. – It was tied 1-1 going into the third period. It turned into a blowout. And after a five-goal barrage, one like none other in Florida playoff history, the Panthers are one win from their third consecutive trip to the Stanley Cup Final.
Niko Mikkola and Aleksander Barkov each scored twice, and Panthers — fueled by five goals in a span of nine minutes — rolled past the Carolina Hurricanes 6-2 on Saturday night to take a 3-0 lead in the Eastern Conference finals.
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Jesper Boqvist — playing for the injured Sam Reinhart — scored the go-ahead goal early in the third for Florida and Brad Marchand also scored for the Panthers, who got 23 saves from Sergei Bobrovsky.
“In the third period, I think we took over,” Barkov said.
That's an understatement from the Panthers' captain.
Logan Stankoven and Seth Jarvis scored for Carolina, which has now dropped 15 consecutive East finals games — getting swept by Pittsburgh in 2009, Boston in 2019, Florida in 2023 and are now on the brink of it happening again.
Game 4 is Monday in Sunrise.
“They’re a good team, for sure," Carolina's Sebastian Aho said. "But I feel like we’ve been giving them the momentum or a goal at the wrong time — and obviously they’ve made us pay”
Florida's five third-period goals were a club record for any playoff period and ruined what had seemed like a good move by Carolina to switch goaltenders going into Game 3. The Hurricanes went with Pyotr Kochetkov in net, after Frederik Andersen gave up nine goals on just 36 shots in the first five periods of the series.
Kochetkov stopped 14 of 15 shots through two periods. The third, not so much. A tie game became a rout in a hurry.
“I don’t think the way the games have been played is really an indication of what the outcomes have been score-wise," Marchand said. "They’ve been pretty tight. It just seems like we’ve got a couple of bounces and a couple lucky breaks here and there that have kind of given us a pretty good lead.”
Florida got a break to make it 1-0. Barkov threw a pass across the goal crease, the puck hitting the stick of Evan Rodrigues before finding Mikkola — who tried to feed it back across for Barkov.
It never got there. Mikkola's pass deflected off Carolina defenseman Dmitry Orlov and past Kochetkov, opening the scoring and giving Florida an 11-2 cumulative score lead in the series to that point.
Stankoven — who was flat-out robbed by Bobrovsky earlier in the game — tied it on the power play at 14:51 of the second, a breakthrough of sorts for the Hurricanes.
Brent Burns took a shot from near the blue line that Bobrovsky stopped. The rebound skipped off Bobrovsky's leg and Stankoven redirected it home to make it 1-1 — the first tie of the series, other than 0-0 scores to begin games.
But the third, like the bulk of the series, was all Florida.
“We have to try to put our best foot forward," Hurricanes coach Rod Brind'Amour said. "I felt like we did tonight for two periods.”
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AP NHL playoffs: https://apnews.com/hub/stanley-cup and https://apnews.com/hub/nhl