The Florida Panthers were beaten 4-2 by the Tampa Bay Lightning in a feisty, penalty-filled contest at Amerant Bank Arena.

Eetu Luostarinen opened the scoring 5:27 into the action, on Florida’s first shot on goal, when he backhanded the puck out of the air off the shaft his stick with the assists going to Mackie Samoskevich and Evan Rodrigues.

With Steven Santini serving time in the sin bin, Max Crozier and Anthony Cirelli combined to work the puck up the ice where Jake Guentzel caught up to it and then beat Sergei Bobrovsky from the left circle to tie the score at the 13:05 mark.

Pontus Holmberg gave the Lightning the lead with eight seconds left in the frame when he solved Bobrovsky from the top of the right circle after taking a cross from Yanni Gourde. Uvis Balinskis failed to get the puck deep into the Tampa Bay zone and Declan Carlile turned the play around after getting struck with the attempted dump-in.

Gage Goncalves chipped Carlile’s outlet pass up to Brayden Point creating a 2-on-1 break with Nikita Kucherov. Point easily pulled away from Brad Marchand and backhanded the puck across the slot to his running mate, who calmly tapped it between Bobrovsky’s pads 2:31 into the second.

Marchand would get the goal back at 7:05 with the Panthers up a man. After Sam Bennett won an offensive draw to Samoskevich, the second-year man exchanged passes with Jones before feeding down low to Sam Reinhart. Reinhart one-touched the puck to Bennett, who whipped it over to Marchand in the right circle and he buried his shot to pull the Cats back within one.

The Panthers had loads and loads of man-advantage time in the third, but they couldn’t find the equalizer and Kucherov put the dagger into the empty net with 56 seconds left on the clock to give the Bolts the season-series lead two games to one.

Florida’s power play was the main culprit in this one. Given a bevy of chances, the Panthers finished the night just 1-for-9 and surrendered Guentzel’s shorthanded marker. Bobrovsky was solid, finishing with 21 saves on 24 shots, but he failed mano a mano against both Guentzel and Holmberg in the first, putting his team in a hole they couldn’t dig out of.

Stat Card