Up 3-0, Panthers will not ‘start looking ahead’
-
Greg Wyshynski
SUNRISE, Fla. — The Florida Panthers are one win away from an Eastern Conference finals sweep. They’ve outscored the Carolina Hurricanes, a team that’s lost 15 straight conference final games, by a count of 16-4. Yet Panthers forward Brad Marchand is still ready for this series to go the distance.
“We’re prepared to go seven here,” he said after their 6-2 victory in Game 3 on Saturday night. “I mean, you can’t start looking ahead. That’s such a dangerous game to play.”
Contextually, that mindset might seem preposterous. The Panthers are trying to match the Tampa Bay Lightning as the only teams since the Edmonton Oilers’ 1980s dynasty to advance to the Stanley Cup Final in three straight seasons, having won the Cup last season. They’ve dominated the Hurricanes with their physicality, scoring depth and the goaltending of Sergei Bobrovsky, who now has a .947 save percentage and a 1.33 goals-against average in the conference finals.
It seems like a matter of when, not if, Florida will eliminate Carolina — and the “when” is trending to be Monday night at home in Game 4. Yet the Panthers are the last team to take a 3-0 lead for granted.
Coach Paul Maurice recalled their semifinals series against the Toronto Maple Leafs in 2023, when they went up 3-0 and dropped a Game 4 on home ice. “We wanted it so bad that we tried to win the game on every play,” he said.
Then came the ultimate lesson on how not to close out a series: The 2024 Stanley Cup Final, which saw the Panthers squander a 3-0 series lead to the Edmonton Oilers before finally winning Game 7 to hoist the Cup for the first time.
Maurice hopes his players understand the dynamics at play in Game 4.
“They have the desperation advantage. You have, potentially, the desire advantage. Both teams will fight that. Can we control the desire emotion and play the game? Can they control the desperation emotion and play the game? The common denominator is just playing the game,” he said.
Game 3 saw the Hurricanes play with more desperation than they’ve exhibited in this series. The game was tied 1-1 entering the third period after Carolina’s Logan Stankoven — who Bobrovsky robbed earlier in the second period with a lunging blocker save — managed to knock the puck past him for a power-play goal at 14:51 to even the score.
The Hurricanes were finally looking like the stingy, tight-checking team they’re known for being. Maurice wasn’t expecting a windfall of offense from the Panthers after the first 40 minutes of Game 3.
“We’re not going out to the third period saying, ‘Well, we can tell this is going to work out [for us]. I’ve got an extra piece of gum in my pocket for the second overtime. That’s how our experience with Carolina has been,” the coach said.
The gum stayed in his pocket. Florida scored five goals in the first 10:37 of the third period to put the game — and potentially the series — away.
“We knew we needed to be a little better than what we were in the second period, so we tried to keep things simple and I think we got rewarded for that,” said captain Aleksander Barkov, who had two of the goals in the onslaught.
Carolina coach Rod Brind’Amour was left dumbfounded.
“We’re playing better and then we just turn pucks over. It’s not what we do. I think everyone’s just pretty surprised, you know what I mean?” he said. “Just you can’t do that. In a preseason game it’s going to cost you. But against that team, and you turn it over for odd man rushes? Forget it.”
The key to the rally was a goal by forward Jesper Boqvist, who was put on Barkov’s line as an injury replacement for Sam Reinhart, the Panthers’ leading scorer in the regular season. He took a short pass from linemate Evan Rodrigues and then turned Carolina defenseman Dmitry Orlov (minus-4) inside out before scoring on the backhand against Pyotr Kochetkov (22 saves), who got the start over Frederik Andersen in Game 3 for Carolina.
Boqvist had just one goal and one assist in 9 playoff games this postseason, averaging 8:53 in ice time. In Game 3, he had three points (1 goal, 2 assists) and skated 15:08 for the Panthers.
“He’s an extremely gifted player. I love playing with him. He can kind of play anywhere in the lineup and he’s such an incredible skater. So strong with the puck, so smart. And that was a massive goal,” Marchand said.
The Panthers won Game 3 without Reinhart and without having forward Eetu Luostarinen for most of the game, after he was ejected for boarding Carolina forward Jackson Blake in the first period. Luostarinen was tied for the team lead with 13 points entering Game 3, with 4 goals and 9 assists.
The Panthers would kill off that 5-minute major in what Maurice called “a real inflection point in the game,” considering that Florida was missing key penalty killers in Luostarinen and Reinhart, who is day-to-day with a lower body injury. When they needed him, Bobrovsky (23 saves) was a great last line of defense.
Thanks to their third-period deluge, the Panthers are now poised to sweep the Hurricanes in the conference final for the second time in three postseasons. Yet even with Florida’s domination of the series, Marchand said his team is anything but overconfident.
“I don’t think the way the games have been played is really an indication of what the outcome’s been, score wise. They’ve been pretty tight. It just seems like we’ve gotten a couple bounces, a couple lucky breaks here and there that have given us a pretty good lead,” he said.
“But it doesn’t matter. It’s not going to change anything about next game. We’ve got to come in and prepare the same way. It’s always the toughest one to get, so we got to make sure we bring our best.”
-
Alden Gonzalez
LOS ANGELES — Roki Sasaki, finally ramping up after spending the past three months on the injured list, said Tuesday he had “no pain” in his right shoulder and expressed confidence in his ability to regain fastball velocity, which began to tail off before he was shut down.
“I feel better about being able to throw harder, especially because I’m completely pain free,” Sasaki said through an interpreter. “With that being said, I do have to just face live hitters and see how my mechanics, you know, hold. Just being consistent; being able to do that consistently.”
Sasaki is scheduled to pitch three simulated innings at Dodger Stadium over the weekend before going on a rehab assignment. The Dodgers will stretch Sasaki back out as a starting pitcher. How he eventually fits in, though, remains to be seen.
The Dodgers’ rotation is currently full, with Blake Snell and Tyler Glasnow back healthy, Shohei Ohtani stretched out to at least four innings, and Clayton Kershaw, Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Emmet Sheehan making up the other three spots of a six-man rotation.
Asked if he could eventually see Sasaki occupying a bullpen spot, specifically in October, Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said: “I’m going to hold on that one. I do know we’re going to take the 13 best pitchers. I’ve been a part of many postseason rosters, so we’re going to take the 13 best pitchers. If Roki is a part of that in some capacity, then that would be great. And if he’s not, then he won’t be.”
Before that is even entertained, Sasaki simply has to perform better.
The 23-year-old right-hander arrived in the major leagues after being one of the most hyped pitchers to come out of Japan, armed with a triple-digit fastball and a mind-bending splitter. But evaluators throughout the industry also acknowledged he still needed more seasoning. That wound up being the case early, even more so than many anticipated.
Through his first eight starts, before landing on the IL with what the Dodgers described as a shoulder impingement, Sasaki posted a 4.72 ERA and failed to complete six innings on seven occasions. In a stretch of 34⅓ innings, he walked almost as many batters (22) as he struck out (24). The four-seam fastball, which often lacked command, fell into the mid-90s over his last handful of outings. Often, the splitter functioned as his only legitimate major league pitch.
Sasaki acknowledged that “American hitters have a different approach at the plate compared to Japanese hitters.”
“I can’t really attack the same way that I used to in Japan,” he added.
With that in mind, Sasaki has begun to experiment with a two-seam fastball, a pitch that runs in on opposing right-handed hitters and is designed to generate early contact, ideally ground balls. The hope is that it eventually functions as a second fastball to pair with his splitter and slider.
The focus at this point, though, is on nailing down the mechanics of his delivery so that his shoulder no longer becomes an issue. Sasaki said he now has “a better understanding a second time through on where the pain came from and how to make sure that the pain doesn’t come back.” His mechanics are “not 100 percent right now,” Sasaki added, “but I think it’s in the right direction.”
When he returns, Sasaki will have to prove he belongs.
“My every intention is to get back on the major league mound and pitch again,” he said. “With that being said, you know … I do need to fight for the opportunity, too. I don’t think that I’ll just be given the opportunity right away.”
-
Sports3 years ago‘Storybook stuff’: Inside the night Bryce Harper sent the Phillies to the World Series
-
Sports1 year agoStory injured on diving stop, exits Red Sox game
-
Sports2 years agoGame 1 of WS least-watched in recorded history
-
Sports2 years agoMLB Rank 2023: Ranking baseball’s top 100 players
-
Sports4 years ago
Team Europe easily wins 4th straight Laver Cup
-
Sports2 years agoButton battles heat exhaustion in NASCAR debut
-
Environment2 years agoJapan and South Korea have a lot at stake in a free and open South China Sea
-
Environment2 years agoGame-changing Lectric XPedition launched as affordable electric cargo bike