SUNRISE, Fla. — In every one of their four games in the last week, the Florida Panthers have fallen behind.
Every time, they’ve come back to win.Until the end, the Panthers’ latest comeback wasn’t quite as dramatic as their last, when they stormed back from four down to beat the Toronto Maple Leafs in overtime. On Friday, Florida were only down by two and were tied up by the end of the second period, although it took until the final minute to win. With 37.3 seconds left, Sam Bennett finished on the doorstep off a feed from Aleksander Barkov and Florida regrouped from a lifeless first period to beat the Buffalo Sabres, 4-3.
Florida (50-14-6) now has 50 wins this season and 25 have been come-from-behind victories. The nickname “Comeback Cats” is well-earned for this group — for good and ill.
The good is evident just by looking at the standings: The Panthers have an eight-point lead in the Eastern Conference and a six-point lead in the Atlantic Division, and their win Friday, for the moment, moved them into a tie with the Colorado Avalanche in the race for the Presidents’ Trophy. Comebacks, by their very nature, require some modicum of luck, but Florida doesn’t often win with it — the Panthers lead the NHL in goal differential and are on pace to be the league’s highest scoring team since the 1995-96 NHL season.
The bad has been obvious this week and Florida has tried to make it the focus: Only two teams in NHL history had ever had a pair of four-goal comebacks in the same season before the Panthers pulled it off twice in the first week. Florida also is the first team in NHL history with five three-goal comebacks in a single season — history is not on the Panthers’ side, especially once they get to the 2022 Stanley Cup playoffs and have to face stiffer competition than the Sabres.
After Florida pulled off the second of its two four-goal comebacks Tuesday against the Maple Leafs, Barkov said, “it’s time to learn.” The Panthers rank in the top 10 in every major offensive category and most major defensive categories, yet they play with a strangely thin margin of error for such a dominant team because they’ve trailed at some point in the vast majority of their games this season.
At the first intermission Friday, they were down 3-1 and their ugly start meant they wound up in a three-period battle with one of the worst teams in the league.
In the first period, Buffalo (26-36-11) jumped ahead 1-0 on a power-play goal by Sabres winger Victor Olofsson, then went up 2-1 as Mark Pysyk, Buffalo’s offensive-minded defenseman and a former fan favorite in South Florida, shot from the point and scored when defenseman MacKenzie Weegar inadvertently deflected a puck past Sergei Bobrovsky. The Sabres’ third goal came after a defensive-zone giveaway by the Panthers and prompted a smattering of boos from the 17,728 inside FLA Live Arena.
Bobrovsky, who started each of the four-goal comebacks and got benched before the start of the third period both times, gave up three goals on the first eight shots he faced, then stopped the next 14. Still, the star goaltender has given up at least three goals in seven of his last eight starts.
At the time, Buffalo was outplaying — or at least playing even with — the Stanley Cup contenders. Florida had a 13-12 edge in shots on goal and 12-9 lead in scoring chances, but the Sabres had the advantage in total shot attempts and high-danger chances were even.
Although they dominated the final two periods, the Panthers were tied 3-3 with Buffalo in the final minute. Their early two-goal hole meant their 24-5 advantage in 5-on-5 shots in the final two periods wasn’t enough to bury the Sabres, until a perfect passing sequence ended with the puck in the back of the net and a sixth straight Florida win.
