Battle of the Goalies
Tomas Vokoun is arguably in the best form so far of his early Panthers career; having one solid performance after another. Coming off a 4th shutout win of the season, against Carolina, he had an equally adept goalie on the other side of the ice yesterday; in the form of Ny Rangers Henrik Lundqvist.
It quickly become apparent that these two goaltenders were going to have a private battle in this game; one trying to out-do the other with plentiful and brilliant saves. It was a forwards nightmare as the netminders wouldn’t give them any opening to aim at.
The contest itself was a very tight affair, as could be expected between two teams that puts its defense first and has had a lot of success in doing so. Yet there was also plenty of open play and the puck was continuously being hauled back and forth in search of those elusive goal scoring chances which both sets of forwards were craving. Both teams also had sustained spells of pressure in one-another’s zones – cranking off hopeful shots that the goaltenders easily snapped out of the air.
It was the visitors that finally could draw first blood when Fredrik Sjöström had a shot that squeaked in behind Vokoun, after the Rangers players had been left alone to jab at him from within the crease. Both Tomas and the puck were in the end knocked over the line. It wasn’t pretty, but the Rangers seldomly care about cosmetics and were happy just to be on the board.
The New Yorkers go-ahead goal came late in the first period and early in the second period the Panthers had leveled affairs. Michael Frolik scored again, this time picking up the puck from a nice feed from behind the net by Stillman. Frolik turned around and snapped his shot along the ice – beating Lundqvist between the pads.
The goal electrified an otherwise subdued crowd and the rest of the game became a thrilling hunt for what everyone more or less understood would be the winning goal; seeing as how well the two goaltenders were playing. In the third period Vokoun and Lundqvist exchanged saves and the contest went first to overtime and then the shootouts.
The Florida Panthers have not done well in shootouts this year and were now facing the best team in the NHL in this respect. Much of the Rangers success is due to Lundqvist, who stopped the first three Panther shooters; Stillman, Horton and Weiss. He could however not stop the red-hot Richard Zednik who scored on Florida’s fourth attempt. Tomas Vokoun meanwhile did his job more than well and fended off all four Ranger shooters: The Cats won a shootout!!
Credit must go to Vokoun for the victory, but everyone on the team played well and matched the Rangers line-for-line; despite playing that crucial game away to Carolina just the night before.
Now follows a day’s well earned rest and then the Washington Capitals come to town for another match-up. It will be a very tough game for the Panthers, but one I think everyone now believes we can win if we just get a couple of pucks bouncing our way – and not in the Caps direction – as in the previous meeting a week ago today.
