BOSTON — The Florida Panthers leveled their best-of-seven series against the Bruins by winning Game 2, 6-3, on Wednesday night at TD Garden.
With the game knotted at two entering the third, Florida simply took over, capitalizing on Boston’s mistakes and scoring four goals to seal the victory.
“You can’t get too far behind anybody. Certainly not a team like the Boston Bruins in the season they’ve had this year, so you build a little belief in each game,” Panthers head coach Paul Maurice said postgame, per Bruins-provided transcript. “That’s what we’re trying to do. We’d be more than happy to play seven of them. We’d be fine with that. Grind it as hard as we can for as long as we can.”
Maurice said the Bruins’ play the defensive zone very heavy by being able to collapse in their own end and surround the puck, and then breakout toward the offensive zone.
“The thing that I feel about Boston is that their strength is their four-man rush. They start low. They don’t cheat,” Maurice explained. “There’s not a tremendous amount of stretch in their game where the forwards are at the far blue line waiting for a pass. They’ll stretch to speed. They’ll stretch at the right time.”
So how does Florida defend that?
“We just have to skate our (expletive) off,” Maurice said. “At the end of the day, that’s all we can do is skate as fast as we possibly can to try to limit that.”
The Panthers dropped the first game of the series, 3-1, on Monday night but got an intricate part of their lineup back, with Sam Bennett playing for the first time in a month after suffering a lower-body injury.
“He drives the play. He plays so damn hard and drives the play,” Maurice said. “What do they always say about great players? They make the players around them better. So, Sam has been so important to us this year — even like in a heart and soul — he gets injured, and we lose him; we lose the next four games. Now we’ve got to find a way to rally around that, but he’s been fantastic for us.”
The Panthers were not able to execute on the man advantage going 0-for-3 but were able to stop the Bruins from capitalizing on more than one opportunity while Florida was in the box. Maurice didn’t think the penalties has any effect on the outcome of the game.
“I will not answer an officiating question based on my horrible experience in Toronto this year,” Maurice said with a chuckle when asked about the calls. “… I don’t think we had controlled the game, and then we did something egregious.
“I think early, they were strong. How the game is officiated sometimes makes you feel that you’re either really smart or really stupid. Coaches feel that way about referees.”
The Bruins will look to reclaim the series lead when they treavel to Sunrise, Fla., for Game 3 on Friday. Puck drop from FLA Live Arena is scheduled for 7:30 p.m. ET. You can catch the game on, plus an hour of pregame coverage, on NESN.
